Adriano Massuda is a professor at the Getúlio Vargas Foundation School of Business Administration (EAESP-FGV) and a researcher at the Center for Studies in Health Planning and Management (FGV-Saúde). Graduated in Medicine by the Federal University of Paraná-UFPR (2003). He has residency in Preventive and Social Medicine (2005) and in Health Administration (2006), and Master’s (2010) and PhD (2014) in Health Policy and Planning by the Department of Collective Health at the State University of Campinas. Worked as a physician at Primary Care Unit in Campinas (2007-2008), advisor to the superintendent of the Hospital de Clínicas daUnicamp (2008- 2009), Head of Staff of the Ministry of Sports, Deputy Executive Secretary of the Ministry of Health(2011-2012), Municipal Secretary of Health of Curitiba (2013-2015), National Secretary of Science, Technology and Strategic Inputs of the Ministry of Health (2015), Professional Training Coordinator of the Brazilian Company of hospital Services (2016). Former visiting scientist at the Department of Global Health and Population at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (2016-2020), external consultant of the Pan American Health Organization(2016-2019), and an associate professor at the UFPR (2008- 2021). Experiences in research areas of Policies, Planning and Management in Health , and Innovation in Health Systems.
Andiara Schwingel is an Associate Professor in the Department of Kinesiology and Community Health at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she also serves as Associate Head for Undergraduate Studies. Before joining the University of Illinois, Dr. Schwingel held a post-doctoral position at the National University of Singapore. A native of Brazil, Professor Schwingel received her Ph.D. in sports medicine from the University of Tsukuba in Japan, after completing Bachelor and Masters degrees from the Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil. During 13 years as a faculty member at Illinois, Dr. Schwingel has studied health equity issues with great interest in Latinx populations, as well as in other historically underserved populations. Her research on chronic disease prevention and management is interdisciplinary and focuses on behavior change, mixed-method approaches and community engagement. She has developed and evaluated community-based health interventions in Chicago, Champaign, and rural Illinois using the Community Health Worker (CHW) model. Her work is also international as she has developed health education curricula for training CHWs from Brazil in collaboration with local public health agencies and policy makers. Her current research focuses on improving health equity in Illinois by training CHWs on various health education topics. Her research is designed to inform both public health policy and practice with the overall goal of developing and sustaining healthier communities. Her work has been published in leading journals in the field and funded by campus and external agencies and foundations, including the Lemann Center. In her home department, Dr. Schwingel teaches in the areas of aging, women’s health, and global health. This year she is leading a study abroad program in Italy examining public health initiatives in that country. She has received several teaching awards including 2022 University of Illinois Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award. In addition to her formal coursework, Dr. Schwingel has also been active in incorporating historically underrepresented students as active collaborators in her research group, the Aging and Diversity Lab (ADL), and in the “Student Aging Researchers in Training” (START). A priority for START is to involve students from historically underrepresented backgrounds in hands on research experiences, academic enrichment, and community support.
Dr. Antonio Carlos Lessa is Full Professor of International Relations at the Universidade de Brasília (UnB). He was the Lemann Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Illinois in the Fall 2022 semester. Professor Lessa teaches courses on the History of Brazilian Foreign Policy in graduate and undergraduate programs. He also serves as Senior Research Fellow and Deputy Coordinator at UnB’s Center for Global Studies. He founded and coordinated the Center for Brazilian Foreign Policy Studies, a laboratory for graduate students in UnB’s Institute of International Relations as well as worked with the prestigious Brazilian Diplomatic Academy (Instituto Rio Branco) and other Brazilian governmental offices in the Ministries of Foreign Affairs, Education, Science and Technology and Defense. He has taught at the Universidad Nacional de Rosario, in Argentina; the Universidad de la República, in Uruguay; and the Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, in Brazil; as well as served as fellow at the Centre d’Etudes sur le Brésil at the Université de Paris-Sorbonne, and at the University of Strasbourg, both in France.
Carlos Brandt is the head of Pix Management and Operation at the Central Bank of Brazil. Graduated in engineering and law, specialized in finance and law, led Pix design and implementation process in Brazil and is currently leading and driving Pix’s evolving agenda, with new features and products. He coordinates the Pix Forum, a permanent advisory committee for new products and improvement in the existing ones. Carlos was nominated for the Bloomberg 50 list in 2021 – a list of people and ideas that defined global business in 2021 – which is a recognition of great achievements with Pix for the entire Central Bank of Brazil team.
Daniel De Bonis is the Director of Knowledge, Data & Research at the Lemann Foundation, leading the Foundation’s initiatives on monitoring, evaluation and research, contributing to evidence-based decision making on our initiatives on basic education and public leadership. He has served as Deputy Secretary of Education for the City of São Paulo (2017-2020), where he had the chance to lead education reforms at the local level that helped to improve students’ learning on external assessments. His experience in the public sector in Brazil includes having served as policy coordinator at the City Council of São Paulo, special aide of the governor of São Paulo State, and project manager at Ethos Institute and Abrinq Foundation for Children’s Rights. Daniel holds a PhD degree in Public Administration and Government from Fundação Getúlio Vargas and was a Visiting Scholar at the School of International & Public Affairs at Columbia University (2014-2015).
Daniela Fontes holds a PhD in Economics from PUC-Rio, a MSc in Economics from London School of Economics – LSE and a bachelor’s degree in Economics from PUC-Rio. She has worked as a consultant in projects as process analysis, leadership evaluation, mergers and acquisitions, pricing and sales forecast. She was a lecturer in the economics department of PUC-Rio for 10 years, where she taught microeconomic courses. She is currently a clinical assistant professor in the department of economics at UIUC.
David Plank is a Professor (Research) Emeritus at the Stanford University School of Education, Executive Director of Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE), and Co-Director of Lemann Center for Educational Entrepreneurship and Innovation in Brazil. He has also served as a consultant to national and international organizations including the World Bank, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the United States Agency for International Development, the Ford Foundation, and also to governments in Africa and Latin America. Plank is the author and editor of six books, including the AERA Handbook on Educational Policy Research. He has published several studies on Brazilian Education including the book The Means of Our Salvation: Public Education in Brazil, 1930-1995, which was published in Brazil as Política Educacional no Brasil: Caminhos para a Salvação Pública. Plank was a Visiting Professor at the Federal University of Bahia from 1990 to 1995. He has also worked closely with the Brazilian Ministry of Education and Culture and the World Bank to develop and implement reforms in the country’s basic education system.
Denis Mizne heads the private foundation established by global entrepreneur Jorge Paulo Lemann to increase the quality of public education in Brazil. He is also chairman of the board of Instituto Sou da Paz and serves on other boards in the areas of education, human rights and public safety. Before joining the Foundation, Denis was founder and Executive Director of Instituto Sou da Paz, a leading Brazilian NGOs focused on violence prevention. He has contributed to the approval of the “Disarmament Statute,” one of the most modern pieces of legislation to control the use of guns. After being enacted, the law helped reduce homicides for the first time in decades in the country – thousands of lives have been saved.
Edmund Amann is Professor of Brazilian Studies at Leiden University and Visiting Professorial Lecturer at the School for Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University. Previously he was Reader in Development Economics in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Manchester and Research Fellow at the University of Oxford Centre for Brazilian Studies. His research centres on regulation, innovation and foreign direct investment in a developing country context. Much of his work focuses on the experiences of Latin America, especially Brazil. He has published in a wide range of development and economics journals including World Development and Oxford Development Studies. He is joint editor of the Oxford Handbook of the Brazilian Economy. In addition, he has acted as a consultant for the Inter-American Development Bank and was author of the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Brazil Country Report.
Flavia Andrade is an Associate Professor at the School of Social Work and Associate Director of the Lemann Center for Brazilian Studies. Dr. Andrade has earned her bachelor’s degree in Economics and her master’s degree in Demography from the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Brazil. She completed her master’s in Population Health and Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA. Dr. Andrade is a Fellow of the Gerontological Society of America. Dr. Andrade has published over 100 articles and book chapters examining older adults’ health in the Americas, particularly Brazil, Mexico, and the US. Her work has contributed to understanding how demographic, epidemiological, and nutritional changes, as well as social disparities, influence the health, well-being, and quality of life of older adults.
Mrs. Izabella Mônica Vieira Teixeira is a native Brazilian. She holds a Ph.D. in Energy Planning and was Brazil´s Minister of the Environment (2010 – 2016). From 2008 to 2010, she was the Deputy Minister of the Environment. Her international experience comes from the negotiation and management of international projects in Brazil (e.g PPG7,). By the invitation of UN´s Secretary General, she was a member of the High-Level Panel on Global Sustainability. She was also a key leader of the 2012 UN´s Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Development. After Rio+20 she was again appointed by the UN´s Secretary-General as a member of the High-Level Panel on the Post-2015 Development Agenda (SDG’s Agenda 2030). In 2015, Minister Teixeira was Head of the Brazilian Delegation on negotiations of the Paris Agreement of the UN Convention on Climate Change. For her outstanding career, in 2013 Minister Izabella Teixeira received the United Nations Environment Program “Champions of the Earth” award for Policy Leadership. Today, she is Co-Chair of The International Resource Panel – IRP/UNEP-ONU, Board Member UN DESA, Senior Fellow of Institute Arapyaú, and Trustee for Environment and Climate Change of Brazilian Center for International Relations- CEBRI and for Fernando Henrique Cardoso Foundation.
Jerry Dávila holds the Jorge Paulo Lemann Chair in Brazilian History at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. He is also Executive Director of the Illinois Global Institute. His research concerns race relations, social movements, and public policy in Brazil. He is the author of Diploma of Whiteness: Race and Social Policy in Brazil, 1917-1945 (Duke, 2003), Hotel Trópico: Brazil and the Challenge of African Decolonization, 1950-1980 (Duke, 2010), and Dictatorship in South America (Wiley, 2013). He is also co-author of A History of World Societies, 12 ed. (Bedford/St. Martins, 2021). Jerry Dávila has taught in Brazil as Fulbright Distinguished Chair at the Federal University of Minas Gerais in 2022 and the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro in 2005. He was also a Fulbright Scholar at the University of São Paulo in 2000.
John Tofik Karam is director of the Lemann Center for Brazilian Studies and professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is trained in anthropology, the node for the transnational scales of analysis that he develops across Latin American studies and Middle East studies. Funded by Fulbright grants, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and other sources, his scholarship explores Latin America-Middle East connections in the making of global cultural and political economies. His first book, Another Arabesque: Syrian-Lebanese Ethnicity in Neoliberal Brazil (Temple University Press) won awards from the Arab American National Museum and the Brazilian Studies Association and was translated into Portuguese by the Editora Martins Fontes and into Arabic by the Centre for Arab Unity Studies. With María del Mar Logroño Narbona and Paulo G. Pinto, he coedited the volume, Crescent over Another Horizon: Islam in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Latino U.S.A. (University of Texas Press). Set at the trinational border between Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina, his most recent book is Manifold Destiny: Arabs at an American Crossroads of Exceptional Rule (Vanderbilt University Press). One of his current research projects is “Agro Cultura: What Brazil Sells to the Arab World,” exploring planetary narratives of economic and environmental sustainability via Brazilian agricultural and cultural products in the Arabian Gulf, Eastern Mediterranean, and North Africa which make up the third largest market for Brazilian exports in the world.
Jorge Paulo Lemann was born in 1939 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from Harvard University in 1961. Mr. Lemann founded and was Senior Partner of Banco Garantia from 1971 to 1998. From then until 2005, he was a director of the Gillette Company in Boston and of AmBev in Brazil. He was also Chairman of the Latin American Advisory Committee of the New York Stock Exchange and a member of the DaimlerChrysler International Advisory Board. He is one of the controlling shareholders of Anheuser-Busch InBev and founding partner at 3G Capital. Mr. Lemann is co-founder and director of Fundação Estudar and Fundação Lemann, nonprofit organizations that provide scholarships and new educational techniques for Brazilians.
Julia Callegari is the Research and Data Manager at the Lemann Foundation. She holds a Master’s degree in Public Administration from Harvard and a Master’s in Economics from the University of São Paulo. Previously, she worked with education policy, supporting the Ministry of Education in creating and implementing the Brazilian nationwide Common Core (BNCC). During her time at Harvard, she collaborated with the City Council of Freetown, Sierra Leone, leading a project to improve learning outcomes in municipal schools. She also has experience as a management consultant, economic analyst, and researcher at the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (CEPAL). Her main research interest is in the field of education equity, particularly the promotion of ethnic-racial identity development within schools and its impact on students’ academic and social lives.
Juliana Mozachi Sandri is a lawyer, Master of Public Administration by the American University, and Doctor of Education by the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. As a Lemann Fellow during her doctoral studies, she works for the Banco Central do Brasil as the Head of Conduct Supervision of the Brazilian financial system. She has been working for the Brazilian government for 16 years in different positions, among them, she was the head of the corporate university of the Banco Central do Brasil for 8 years. Before that, Juliana used to work for an international bank. In 2022 she has been nominee Vice-Chair of the International Financial Consumer Protection Organisation (FinCoNet) She lives in Brasília, Brazil, with her husband, kids, and pets.
Jurema Werneck is co-founder of Criola – a 30 years old black women’s organization based in Rio de Janeiro and of the Articulation of Brazilian Black Women’s Organizations, being its first Executive Secretary. An experienced activist in the fields of human rights, racial and gender equality and Black population’s and Black women’s health. She is a medical doctor, with a doctorate in Communication and Culture from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. Since 2017 is the Executive Director of Amnesty International Brazil. Board member for several civil society organizations, such as the Global Fund for Women, Fundo Brasil de Direitos Humanos (Brazil Fund for Human’s Rights), Criola and Greenpeace Brasil. Published books and articles on the situation of Black women and the Black population in Brazil; anti-racism; Black culture, sexual and reproductive rights; public policies for gender and racial equality; Black population health, bioethics and human rights.
Lucas Giannini is the executive director of the Behring Foundation, where he partners with local nonprofits in Curitiba and Rio de Janeiro, as well as supports nationwide initiatives to increase the number of Brazilian students in STEM tracks. Previously, Lucas had experiences at NoRedInk, Upstream USA, Chicago Public Schools, and the Boston Consulting Group. He was also part of the founding team at the Innovation Center for Brazilian Education (CIEB). Lucas has been a board member and mentor to nonprofits in Brazil, such as 42 Rio, doebem, Primeira Chance and Crea+.As a Lemann Fellow and Fundação Estudar scholar, Lucas holds a joint MBA/MA in Education from Stanford University, with a Certificate in Public Management and Social Innovation, and a BSc in Economics from the University of São Paulo.
Marc Hertzman is an associate professor of history at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Before coming to Illinois, he was Assistant Professor of Latin American and Iberian Cultures, and the Director of the Lemann Center for Brazilian Studies at Columbia University. His work focuses on the African diaspora in Brazil. In 2013, he published his first book, Making Samba, which was awarded honorable mention for the Latin American Studies Association’s Bryce Wood Book Prize and the International Association for the Study of Popular Music’s Woody Guthrie Award. In 2020, he published a second book, this one about Gilberto Gil’s boundary-pushing 1975 albumRefazenda. He is currently completing a long-term book project about Palmares, which has been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and multiple programs on campus at Illinois. An article from the project that appeared in 2017 in the American Historical Review won two best-article prizes. He has also written about the political stakes of Palmares’s history in Z-Cultural and published opinion pieces in New York Magazine, Public Seminar, and other venues.
Marcelo C. Medeiros is the Jorge Paulo Lemann Chair of Brazilian Economy at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He was Professor of Economics at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio). Marcelo has a BA, MSc. and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering from PUC-Rio, with an emphasis in Statistics, Optimization and Control Theory. His area of research is econometrics and data science, and he is particularly interested in the intersection between econometric/statistical theory and cutting-edge machine learning tools.
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 Chair of the Brazil Studies Program of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (DRCLAS). 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. She has more than 15 years of collaboration with Brazilian researchers, Health Secretariats, and the Ministry of Health particularly related to infectious diseases. She made important contributions during recent public health emergencies (the Zika virus epidemic and the COVD-19 pandemic). Castro has projects on malaria, COVID-19, arboviruses, infant/child mortality and development, and climate change in the Brazilian Amazon. Specifically, on COVID-19 she has been assessing the spatiotemporal pattern of COVID-19 spread in Brazil, mortality, and fertility changes due to the pandemic, risk factors for mortality, and vaccine effectiveness. 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.
Márcia Lima is National Secretary for Affirmative Action Policies and Combating Racism of Ministry of Racial Equality. She is professor at the Department of Sociology at the University of São Paulo (FFLCH-USP). Also, she is a senior researcher at the Brazilian Center for Analysis and Planning (CEBRAP), where she coordinates the AFRO-Research Group on Race, Gender, and Racial Justice. She obtained her Ph.D. in Sociology at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (2001). She got a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Columbia (2011-2012). She was a Visiting Fellow at the Afro-Latin American Research Institute and the Hutchins Center for African and African American Studies at Harvard University (2016-2017). Her intellectual agenda focuses on race and gender inequalities. She has extensive experience coordinating research on racial disparities and related topics. She has published and supervised students in the following areas: labor market, affirmative action, black feminism, black movement.
Dr. Maria Antonia Tigre is the Global Climate Litigation Fellow at the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School and an adjunct professor at the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University. Prior to the Sabin Center, she was a senior attorney at the Environment Program of the Cyrus R. Vance Center for International Justice. Dr. Tigre was previously a fellow at the World Resources Institute. The fellowship followed several years working in private practice in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Dr. Tigre serves as the Deputy Director of the Global Network for Human Rights and the Environment, where she works with scholars and practitioners in the region to study the interface between human rights and the environment. In addition, Dr. Tigre is a member of the IUCN World Commission on Environmental Law. Dr. Tigre is the author of several publications on regional and international environmental law. She specifically focuses on issues concerning environmental rights, the reshaping of the existing framework of international environmental law, and climate litigation. Originally from Brazil, she also researches the environmental protection of the Amazon ecosystem, emphasizing regional cooperation. She is a TEDx speaker and a frequent speaker at conferences and symposiums.
Dr. Marin Skidmore is an applied economist studying the interaction between policy, agriculture, and the environment. She is an assistant professor in the University of Illinois Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics. Her research focuses on how market-based and public agricultural policy in the United States and the Brazilian Amazon influence farmer behavior. She uses this lens to study indirect policy effects on the environment, including deforestation, GHG emissions, and water quality. She approaches these questions by combining econometric methods, “big data,” extensive field work, and collaboration with interdisciplinary partners in the US and Brazil. Marin received her BS in Economics and Statistics in 2014 and her MS in Agricultural and Applied Economics from the University of Illinois in 2016. During her MS she led her first independent field work in Brazil. Marin finished her PhD in Agricultural and Applied Economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2020. She then worked as a post-doc in the Global Land Use and Environment Lab at UW-Madison before joining the faculty at University of Illinois in 2022. She returned to Brazil in 2018, 2019, and 2023, including spending a year as a Fulbright Research Scholar in Rondônia.
Martin Carnoy is Lemann Foundation Professor at Stanford University. He is co-director of the Lemann Center at Stanford, a former president of the Comparative and International Education Society and a fellow of the National Academy of Education and of the International Academy of Education. He has written forty books and more than 150 articles on the economic value of education, on the political economy of educational policy, on educational production, and on higher education. Much of his work is comparative and international and investigates the way educational systems are organized. Books include: The State and Political Theory (1984), Schooling and Work in the Democratic State (co-author, 1985), Faded Dreams (1994), Sustaining the New Economy: Work, Family and Community in the Information Age (2000), The Charter School Dust-Up (co-author, 2005); Cuba’s Academic Advantage (2007), The Low Achievement Trap: Comparing Schools in Botswana and South Africa (2012), University Expansion in a Changing Global Economy (2014), and Transforming Comparative Education (2019). He is currently completing a book, The Political Economy of Education, which discusses, from a critical perspective, what insights came be drawn about the provision of education. He first did research in Brazil in the 1960s as part of a four-year project on the Latin American free trade area at the Brookings Institution and University of São Paulo. Carnoy has lectured at Brazilian universities, including the Federal University of Bahia in 1985. He has done extensive studies on Brazilian education and policies such as the Education Development Plan (PDE, Plano de Desenvolvimento da Educação). He graduated from Caltech in electrical engineering and from the University of Chicago (Ph.D. in economics).
Mary Arends-Kuenning is Acting Associate Dean of International Programs in the College of Agricultural, Consumer, and Environmental Sciences, Associate Professor in the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics, and former Interim Director of the Lemann Center for Brazilian Studies at the University of Illinois. She is an economic demographer who focuses on household decisions. Her research areas include children’s schooling and child labor, household consumption, family planning, and international migration. She examines the implications of household decisions for household members’ present and future well-being. Her work has been published in World Development, Demography, and Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, among other journals and is widely cited by other researchers and policymakers.
Michael Silvers is chair and associate professor of musicology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of _Voices of Drought: The Politics of Music and Environment in Northeastern Brazil_ (University of Illinois Press, 2018) and is the recipient of fellowships from Fulbright, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Carnegie Corporation of New York. He currently serves as the contributing editor on Brazilian music for the Library of Congress’s Handbook of Latin American Studies.
Olivia C. Coiado, PhD, received her B. S degree in medical physics in 2005 from the University of São Paulo, Brazil, M.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Campinas, Brazil (2008) and Doctorate degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Campinas, Brazil (2012). She completed her post-doc training at the Bioacoustics Research Lab (2013-2015) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she investigated a new technology for cardiac therapy. She is currently a Teaching Associate Professor in both the Carle Illinois College of Medicine and the Bioengineering Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. At Carle Illinois College of Medicine, she acts as the Director of Student Research. In this role, she mentors and advises students and faculty about research, clinical and global studies opportunities. She is an active member of the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) Diversity and International Committee. Dr. Coiado is an expert in active-learning and bioinstrumentation, and she is currently involved in teaching and designing curriculum for the Master’s in Biomedical Engineering program and for biomedical ultrasound for medical students. Her research interests focus on cardiovascular studies, acoustics, bioinstrumentation, and education. Dr. Coiado has published several journal articles in engineering, entrepreneurship, health and medical education, cardiovascular studies, and bioacoustics.
Paulo Blikstein is an Associate Professor at Teachers College, and an Affiliate Associate Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University, where he directs the Lemann Center for Brazilian Studies. His main research focuses on how new technologies can transform the learning of science, engineering, and computation, and on how machine learning and AI can be applied in educational research. A recipient of the National Science Foundation Early Career Award and the AERA Jan Hawkins Early Career Award, Paulo’s work has been featured in The New York Times, ABC News, Scientific American, Wired, and The Guardian. Paulo earned his Ph.D. from Northwestern University, following an MSc. from the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an M.Eng. and B.Eng. from the University of São Paulo, Brazil.
Pedro Hallal is a Professor at the University of Illinois – Champaign/Urbana. Prof. Hallal served as the President of the Federal University of Pelotas, Brazil from 2017 to 2020. His primary area of research is physical activity and public health. Prof. Hallal has published more than 500 scientific articles and his research has been funded by Brazilian and international agencies. According to Google Scholar, Prof. Hallal’s work has been cited >74,000 times, and my h-index is 107. Prof. Hallal was the leader of the 2012 Lancet Physical Activity Series and steering committee member of the 2016 and 2021 series – work that informs the global health burden of physical inactivity. He is one of the founders and former president of the Brazilian Society of Physical Activity and Health. He serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Physical Activity and Health. More recently, Prof. Hallal served as the Principal Investigator for the EPICOVID19 project, the largest epidemiological study on Covid-19 in Brazil.
Rodrigo R. Soares is Lemann Foundation Professor of Economics at Insper, Brazil. Before joining Insper, Rodrigo was a full professor at Columbia University and at the Sao Paulo School of Economics-FGV, associate and assistant professor at PUC-Rio, and assistant professor at the University of Maryland-College Park. His research centers on applied microeconomics, ranging from health and demographic economics to crime and labor. His work has appeared in various scientific journals, including American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, Review of Economic Studies, and American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, among various others. Rodrigo is an Elected Fellow of the Econometric Society and an Honorary Member of Latin American and Caribbean Economic Association. In 2006, he was awarded the Kenneth J. Arrow Award from the International Health Economics Association for the best paper published in the field of Health Economics. He was also awarded four times the research prize from the Brazilian Economic Association (ANPEC), three times for the best paper (2006, 2009, and 2022) and once for the best PhD dissertation (2002). Rodrigo is research fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA, Germany), research affiliate at J-PAL Latin America, and associate editor of the Journal of Human Capital, of the Journal of Demographic Economics, and of the IZA Journal of Development & Migration. Rodrigo has acted as a consultant for the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and state governments in Brazil on issues related to crime and violence, health, and development.
Thomas Trebat is the director of the Columbia Global Centers | Rio de Janeiro, Columbia University’s representation in Brazil. Thomas joined Columbia after a lengthy career on Wall Street dedicated to economic research on Latin America. He formerly served as Executive Director of the Institute of Latin American Studies at Columbia University and of the Institute’s Center for Brazilian Studies. Prior to joining ILAS in February 2005, Tom was Managing Director and Head of the Latin America team in the Economic and Market Analysis department of Citigroup. He joined Citicorp Securities in 1996 as the head of Emerging Market Research. Previously, he worked at Bankers Trust, the Ford Foundation, and Chemical Bank. As a senior international economist at Bankers Trust, he was involved in many aspects of country debt negotiations in Brazil, Chile, Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America during the 1980s. At the Ford Foundation, he served for four years as the regional director for Latin America and Caribbean Programs. At Chemical Bank, Tom organized and directed the emerging markets research group. Mr. Trebat has a PhD in economics from Vanderbilt University and remains active in teaching and publishing. He is also a member of the Council of Foreign Relations. His book, Brazil’s State-owned Enterprises: A Case Study of the State as Entrepreneur, was published by Cambridge University Press in 1983.
Vania Castro is a postdoctoral fellow at the Lemann Center for Brazilian Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). She currently holds the Werner Baer Post-Doctoral Position and is developing an innovative framework to support Brazilian teachers in implementing the new Common Core at schools. She holds a Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), Brazil in May 2021. She was a visiting scholar with the CAPES/PRINT program at UIUC in 2019 and 2020 where she developed part of her doctoral studies. Her research investigated how the seven affordances of the digital aligned to multiliteracies could be drawn upon to design mobile learning experiences in English teaching in underprivileged areas. Her current interests include emerging technologies in education, mobile learning, multiliteracies, teacher education, and artificial intelligence. She was also a Fulbright scholar at Florida State University (FSU) from 2015-2016. Vania enjoys traveling, spending some quality time with her family and dogs, and getting to know new cultures.
Victoria Saramago is associate professor of Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Studies at the University of Chicago. Victoria Saramago’s research interests include twentieth- and twenty-first-century Latin American literatures and cultures with a focus on the environmental humanities, the energy humanities, the Great Acceleration and the Anthropocene, fiction theory, mimesis, and interdisciplinary approaches to literature and the environment. Her current book project, provisionally titled “Against the Current: Electricity and Cultural Production in Brazil’s Anthropocene,” has received a year-long fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Her award-winning book, Fictional Environments: Mimesis, Deforestation, and Development in Latin America, was published in 2021 by Northwestern University Press. She is the co-editor of two books: The Handbook of Latin American Environmental Aesthetics (under contract with De Gruyter) with Jens Andermann and Gabriel Giorgi; and Literature Beyond the Human: Post-Anthropocentric Brazil (Routledge, 2022) with Luca Bacchini. She is also the author of O duplo do pai: O filho e a ficção de Cristovão Tezza (É Realizações, 2013), and her articles have been published in journals such as Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Revista Hispánica Moderna, and Luso-Brazilian Review, among others.
Zara Figueiredo Tripodi holds a PhD in Education from the University of São Paulo (2014), with a period of doctoral research (bolsa sanduíche) in England. She undertook a postdoctoral internship at the Centro de Estudos da Metrópole (CEM / USP) in 2015. Her bachelor’s degree in Letters was earned from PUC Minas (2002), with previous training in Teacher Education (1989). She is a professor at the Department of Education and the Graduate Program in Education at the Federal University of Ouro Preto, assigned to SECADI (Secretaria de Educação Continuada, Alfabetização, Diversidade e Inclusão, or Secretary of Continuing Education, Literacy, Diversity, and Inclusion) of the Ministry of Education (MEC) in 2023. She served as a teacher in public elementary education in Minas Gerais for twenty-one years. From 2017 to 2023, she coordinated the Center for Studies and Research in Public Education Policies (NEPPPE). Her research explores topics such as racial equity in educational policies; educational governance; and state permeability from the perspective of education.