MIT Museum shows “Brazilian Nature: Mystery and Destiny” exhibition

The exhibition will be on display in several cities in Germany, the United States and Canada.

The closing ceremony for FAPESP Week 2012 held in Cambridge, MA, included the opening of the exhibition entitled “Brazilian Nature: Mystery and Destiny” at the MIT Museum on Monday night. The festivities were attended by Carlos Américo Pacheco, Dean of the Technical Institute of Aeronautics (ITA), Carlos Henrique de Brito Cruz, Scientific Director of FAPESP, and Ambassador Fernando de Mello Barreto Filho, Consulate-General of Brazil in Boston.

Pacheco and R. John Hansman, Director of the MIT International Center for Air Transportation, spoke about the agreement recently signed between the two institutions. Under the agreement, MIT will take part in research in the city of São José dos Campos in partnership with ITA. The partnership is slated to begin in 2013.

The agreement between ITA and MIT establishes the lines of joint research to be conducted. It will also involve academic exchanges among students and visiting professors.

FAPESP Scientific Director Carlos Henrique de Brito Cruz spoke about the opportunities for exchanges between FAPESP and the many research and teaching institutions that operate in Boston. He particularly emphasized the Young Researchers and Visiting Foreign Scientists programs.

Professor Ben Ross Schneider of the Department of Political Science at MIT, one of the FAPESP Week 2012 program coordinators (along with Brito Cruz and Marcelo Knobel from Unicamp), also spoke at the ceremony. He made special mention of the MIT Brazil program, one of the 17 binational programs under the MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI).

He said that one of the principal goals of the MIT Brazil Program that began in 2009 is increasing the number of MIT students in Brazil. To this end, he has promoted the addition of Portuguese language instruction in Cambridge.

The MIT Brazil Program website highlights the agreement between MIT and FAPESP, and its initial research results were presented during the session at FAPESP Week 2012 in Cambridge. It also features an article about FAPESP that was published in the January 2011 issue of The Economist magazine.

The exhibition “Brazilian Nature: Mystery and Destiny,” initial result of the partnership between FAPESP and the Botanical Museum of Berlin, displays the documentation of Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius after three years of travel throughout Brazil (1817-1820) along with visual comparison through photographs taken under the program Biota-FAPESP.

The exhibition will be on display in several cities in Germany, the United States and Canada.