A delegation of University of Texas at Austin faculty members and administrators will meet with Brazilian educators and government officials in Brasilia on June 5 to forge new higher education exchanges in science and technology.
UT Austin President Bill Powers will sign a partnership agreement with the Brazilian Federal Agency for Support and Evaluation of Graduate Education at the Brazilian Senate Chambers following a symposium at the Universidade de Brasília.
“Understanding Brazil is critical to understanding not only our own hemisphere but the contours of our emerging global economy and culture,” Powers said. “As a well-established center for studying Latin America, UT Austin stands ready to take our relationship with Brazil to the next level in the interest of both scholarship and friendship. These research partnerships are important and exciting.”
The trip will help raise UT Austin’s profile as an international hub for science and technology and as a leader in forging higher education exchanges with one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. It also offers the potential to attract research investment from Brazil and other Latin American countries, and provides an opportunity to continue building an alumni base in the world’s fifth-largest nation.
The partnership agreement will include an exchange of students and researchers as well as joint research projects as part of Brazil’s Ciência sem Fronteiras (Science without Borders) initiative. Primarily funded by the Brazilian federal government, the program seeks to expand the country’s science and technology initiatives through exchanges of undergraduate and graduate students and researchers.
UT Austin’s Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies (LLILAS) organized the symposium and trip. The symposium “The State of Higher Education in the Americas” will feature presentations by faculty members from UT Austin and several Brazilian universities.
UT Austin and Brazil have a long history of cooperation. The Brazil Center at LLILAS was established in 1995, following 25 years of work by the institute’s Brazilian Studies Committee to diversify and expand interdisciplinary studies of Brazil on the UT Austin campus and to increase the number of faculty members specializing in Brazil. The Brazil Center’s mission is to support Brazilian studies across academic disciplines at UT Austin, and to promote collaborative research and exchange between Texas and Brazil.
Funding for the delegation’s trip to Brazil is being provided through endowments.
