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In celebration of the deepening ties and ever-expanding activities between Harvard and Brazil, we are excited to host an in-person meeting with members of our Harvard-Brazil community (professors, researchers, practitioners, alumni, students) to reconnect and network. As we navigate in turbulent times, this will be a singular opportunity to discuss the critical role Harvard-Brazil collaborations can play in contributing to the advancement of knowledge and education in the years to come.
10:00 AM Coffee and Registration
10:30 AM Welcome
- Claudio Haddad, Chair, Brazil Office Advisory Group
- Marcia Castro, Chair, Brazil Studies Program, Harvard
11:00 AM Values for a Sustainable Society
- Elisa Reis, Professor of Sociology, UFRJ - Moderator
- Helena Nader, President, Brazilian Academy of Science
- Renan Ferreirinha, former Secretary of Education, Rio de Janeiro
- Djamila Ribeiro, Writer and Philosopher
- Flavio Calmon, Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering, Harvard
- Thiago Picolo, Co-CEO, re.green
12:30 PM Lunch
2:00 PM Building Bridges between Science and Practice
- Claudio Haddad, Chair, Brazil Office Advisory Group - Moderator
- Naomi Pierce, Professor of Biology, Harvard
- Yanilda Gonzalez, Assistant Professor of Public Policy, Harvard
- Nívia Raposo, Coordinator, Stop Killing Us Movement
- Naercio Menezes Filho, Professor, Insper
- João Abreu, Co-Founder and Executive Director, Impulso-Gov
- Carlos Nobre, Earth Systems Scientist, IAS-USP
3:30 PM Break
3:50 PM Looking towards Tomorrow: Aspirations for Academic Collaboration
- Marcia Castro, Chair, Brasil Studies Program, Harvard - Moderator
- Aluisio Segurado, Provost for Undergraduate Studies, USP
- Scot Martin, Professor of Environmental Chemistry, Harvard
- Hugo Aguilaniu, Executive Director, Instituto Serrapilheira
- Marcia Machado, Professor of Public Health, UFC
- Carlos Gadelha, Coordenador do Centro de Estudos Estratégicos, Fiocruz
5:30 PM Final Remarks and Closure
- Marcia Castro, Chair, Brazil Studies Program, Harvard
- Claudio Haddad, Chair, Brazil Office Advisory Group
5:40 PM Sunset Cocktail
Mini-bios
João Abreu
João holds a Masters in Public Administration and International Development (MPA/ID) at the Harvard Kennedy School. After studying Economics at the University of São Paulo and Public Administration at Fundação Getulio Vargas (SP), João joined the PPP unit of São Paulo City Hall, where he participated in the design of several public-private partnerships, from the world’s largest public lightning PPP to the regulation of e-hailing apps like Uber in São Paulo. João is the co-founder and Executive Director of ImpulsoGov, a Brazilian tech non-profit that develops digital products for local governments to improve health indicators by making better use of data and technology; it has directly supported over 50 Brazilian cities in the last 2 years, and its products are freely available for all governments in the country.
Hugo Aguilaniu
Hugo Aguilaniu is a geneticist by training. After obtaining his PhD from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, he became a post-doctoral fellow at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, USA. His scientific contributions mainly concern the study of the genetic bases of aging. He then joined the Conseil National de la Recherche Scientifique (National Council for Scientific Research, CNRS) of France, where he became a research director. Following this appointment, he led a research team at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon from 2006 to 2016, where his research was awarded by the CNRS and the ERC (European Research Council). In 2017, he became Executive Director of the Serrapilheira Institute in Rio de Janeiro. He is also a member of the High Council of the Rio de Janeiro Research Agency (FAPERJ).
Flavio Calmon
Flavio P. Calmon is an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering at Harvard's John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Before joining Harvard, he was the inaugural Data Science for Social Good Post-Doctoral Fellow at IBM Research in Yorktown Heights, New York. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. His research develops information-theoretic tools for responsible, reliable, and rigorous machine learning. Prof. Calmon has received the NSF CAREER award, faculty awards from Google, IBM, Oracle, and Amazon, the NSF-Amazon Fairness in AI award, and the Harvard Data Science Initiative Bias2 award, among other grants. He also received the inaugural Título de Honra ao Mérito (Honor to the Merit Title) given to alumni from the Universidade de Brasília, being the first awardee from engineering and computer science.
Marcia Castro
Marcia Castro is Andelot Professor of Demography, chair of the Department of Global Health and Population at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, and director of the Brazil Studies Program of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (DRCLAS) at Harvard University. Her research focuses on the development and use of multidisciplinary approaches to identify the determinants of infectious disease transmission in different ecological settings to inform control policies. At the World Health Organization, she served as co-chair of the Technical Consultation on The Burden of and Response to Malaria in Urban Areas in 2021, and in 2017 as an Advisor of the Evidence Review Group on border malaria. She serves on several advisory boards in Brazil, including the Institute for the Studies of Health Policies (IEPS), the Science Center for Early Childhood (NCPI), and Instituto Todos Pela Saúde (ITpS). She earned a PhD in Demography from Princeton University.
Renan Ferreirinha
Born and raised in São Gonçalo, a poor town in Rio de Janeiro, Renan Ferreirinha was accepted in nine top US universities, 7 of them Ivy League schools. He studied Economics and Political Science at Harvard with a full ride need-based scholarship. He co-founded Mapa Educação, a movement that strives for a quality education for all Brazilians, and Acredito, a political movement that dreams of a new legislature that works for a more just, developed and ethical country. As soon as he graduated in 2017, Ferreirinha returned to Brazil and decided to go into politics. He was elected the youngest state representative in Rio in 2018. At the state parliament, he ran the Economic Committee and conducted the investigation that ended up with the impeachment of the former governor. In 2021, Ferreirinha became the Secretary of Education of the city of Rio and led the successful reopening process of all 1,544 municipal schools.
Carlos Gadelha
Carlos Augusto Gadelha holds a PhD in Economics from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, UFRJ. He is a professor and researcher at the Department of Health Administration and Planning at the Sérgio Arouca National School of Public Health at the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation. He is also the Coordinator and leader of the Research Group on Development, Industrial Economic Complex and Innovation in Health and Coordinator of the Center for Strategic Studies at Fiocruz Antonio Ivo de Carvalho at Fiocruz. He is a fellow researcher at the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq).
Yanilda González
Yanilda María González is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. Her research focuses on policing, state violence, and citizenship in democracy, examining how race, class, and other forms of inequality shape these processes. González’s forthcoming book Authoritarian Police in Democracy: Contested Security in Latin America (Cambridge University Press), studies the persistence of police forces as authoritarian enclaves in otherwise democratic states, demonstrating how ordinary democratic politics in unequal societies can both reproduce authoritarian policing and bring about rare moments of expansive reforms. González received her PhD in Politics and Social Policy from Princeton University. Prior to joining HKS she was an Assistant Professor at the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago.
Claudio Haddad
Claudio Haddad is the Chair of the Harvard Brazil Office Advisory Group, and the President and founder of Insper, a leading not-for-profit business and economics school in Brazil. Haddad is also a member of the board of Instituto Unibanco. During his career, Claudio was a Professor of Economics at the Graduate School of Economics of Fundação Getúlio Vargas between 1974 and 1980, a director for the Central Bank of Brazil, and was a partner for Banco Garantia. He holds a PhD from the University of Chicago, where he wrote his doctoral thesis on the quantitative economic history of post-war Brazil. Haddad also completed the OPM program at Harvard Business School. In 2018, Claudio Haddad received the Alumni Achievement Award, the highest honor conferred to Harvard Business School Alumnus.
Marcia Machado
Marcia Machado is Associate Professor, Department of Community Health at the Faculty of Medicine, Federal University of Ceará; Chief Scientist at FUNCAP - Research Foundation of Ceará, and a member of the Academy of Public Health of Ceará. She received her Ph.D. in Community Health Nursing at UFC in 2006 and was a Postdoc Fellow at Harvard School of Public Health in 2011. Marcia has been for many years a local collaboration of the Field Course in Public Health, organized by Harvard School of Public Health.
Scot Martin
Scot T. Martin is the Gordon McKay Professor of Environmental Science and Engineering and Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences, with appointments in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences & the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. His Ph.D. degree (1995) is in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) supported by a DOD National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship. Prior to his current position, he held an appointment as a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology supported by a NOAA Postdoctoral Fellowship in Climate and Global Change. Professor Martin is the director of the Laboratory of Environmental Chemistry in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University. His research focuses on research and engineering solutions to the major environmental challenges presently facing the world. His laboratory works specifically on problems of air & water pollution and their effects on climate change. He was the lead foreign scientist of the Amazonian Aerosol Characterization Experiment (AMAZE-08), and he directs the Harvard Environmental Chamber. He is principal investigator and lead foreign scientist for "Observations and Modeling of the Green Ocean Amazon (GoAmazon2014)."
Naercio Menezes Filho
Naercio Menezes Filho is the Ruth Cardoso Professor of Economics at Insper and Associate Professor at the University of Sao Paulo. Naercio is also the Director of the Brazilian Centre for Early Child Development and a fellow of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences. He received his PhD. in Economics from the University College London and his main research interests are education, labor market, inequality, and productivity.
Helena Nader
Helena Nader is a biomedical scientist and professor of Molecular Biology who received her PhD at the Federal University of São Paulo (Unifesp) and was a fellow of the Fogarty International Foundation at the University of Southern California. Presently she is the President of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences, co-chair of the Inter-American Network of Academies of Sciences (IANAS) and member of the advisory board of the International Science Council (ISC). Prior to that she served as President of the Brazilian Society for the Advancement of Science and President of the Brazilian Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. She held several administrative functions, including the Provost for Graduate Education (1999-2003) and of Graduate Studies and Research at Unifesp (2007-2008). She is also a member of the Latin American Academy of Sciences (ACAL) and The World Academy of Sciences (TWAS). Her work involves glycochemistry and glycobiology, focusing on glycosaminoglycans and proteoglycans.
Carlos Nobre
Carlos A. Nobre is an Earth System scientist. He graduated in Electronics Engineering from the Aeronautics Institute of Technology (ITA), Brazil, in 1974 and obtained a PhD in Meteorology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA, in 1983. He dedicated his scientific carrier mostly to Amazonian and climate science at Brazil’s National Institutes of Amazonian Research (INPA) and Space Research (INPE). He proposed almost 30 years ago the hypothesis of Amazon ‘savannization’ in response to deforestation. He is a former National Secretary of R&D of Ministry of Science and Technology of Brazil and former President of the Federal Agency for Post-Graduate Education (CAPES). He was one of the authors of IPCC AR4 awarded with the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. He is presently a senior researcher with the Institute for Advanced Studies, University of São Paulo and the creator of the Amazon Third Way-Amazonia 4.0 Initiative that seeks a new development paradigm based on a biodiversity-driven bio-economy utilizing modern technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
Thiago Picolo
Thiago Picolo is co-CEO of re.green, a company with the mission to deliver 1 million hectares of premium ecological restoration at scale, optimizing benefits for climate, biodiversity and people while generating scientific advances, and attractive returns. Previous to that, Thiago was CEO of the chain Hortifruti Natural da Terra, considered the largest retailer of fresh products in the country, with a focus on fruits and vegetables. Thiago graduated from Harvard College in 2001 and completed the HBS OPM program in 2016. He was also one of the founders of the Prep Program, an initiative focused on increasing the presence of Brazilian students in top international colleges, which was merged into Fundação Estudar in 2012.
Naomi Pierce
Naomi E. Pierce is the Hessel Professor of Biology in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, and Curator of Lepidoptera in the Museum of Comparative Zoology. She received her BS in biology from Yale University and her PhD from Harvard. Her research focuses on insect behavioral ecology, particularly symbiosis between ants and other organisms, and she has contributed widely to the fields of ecology and evolutionary biology. She has been involved in reconstructing the evolutionary ‘Tree of life’ of insects, and together with her students and collaborators published the first detailed molecular phylogenies of both the butterflies and the ants. She has received awards including Fulbright and MacArthur Fellowships and in 2019 was awarded the International Prize for Biology for her research on the biology of insects.
Nívia Raposo
Nívia Raposo, mother of Rodrigo Tavares Raposo, is part of the Network of Baixada Mothers and Family Members of Victims of State Violence and one of the coordinators of the Stop Killing Us movement. She is a researcher in the project “Voices of Pain, Struggle and Resistance of Mothers of Victims of State Violence in Brazil”, funded by the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University.
Elisa Reis
Elisa Reis holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is a professor of political sociology at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), and chair of the Interdisciplinary Research Network for the Study of Social Inequality (NIED). She is member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences, and of the World Academy of Science for the Developing World (TWAS), and a fellow of the International Science Council. Professor Reis’s awards and scholarships include those from the Brazilian National Research Council (CNPq.), the Research Council of the State of Rio de Janeiro (FAPERJ), The Fulbright Commission, and the Italian Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche. Her major publications focus on elite perceptions of poverty and inequality, current transformations of nation-states, and the evolving patterns of interaction between state, market, and civil society.
Djamila Ribeiro
Professor Djamila Ribeiro is a public intellectual, writer and philosopher, a social justice activist, and one of the most influential leaders in the Afro-Brazilian women's rights movement. She graduated in political philosophy from the Federal University of São Paulo, where she also earned a master's degree on the work of Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler. A prolific essayist, Djamila is a bestselling author, was one of 51 authors from 25 countries invited to contribute to The Freedom Papers in 2018 and she coordinates the Plural Feminism Collection in which, since 2017, has been publishing black authors in Brazil.
Aluisio Segurado
Dr. Aluisio Segurado is professor of Infectious Diseases at the School of Medicine of the University of São Paulo and Provost for Undergraduate studies at USP. His academic activities cross disciplines and encompass the fields of molecular virology, clinical medicine and public health. His international experience includes acting as Visiting Scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in Atlanta, Georgia, as technical “ad hoc” advisor to the WHO, as well as previous academic research visits to Japan, France and the USA. In 2008, Aluisio was a Visiting Research Fellow in the Program of International Health and Human Rights at the Harvard School of Public Health.