Simon Schwartzman

American Institutes for Research for Brazil

Simon Schwartzman currently serves as Director of the American Institutes for Research for Brazil. He served as the President of Brazil'’s Statistical and Geographical Institute, the Fundação Instituto Brasileiro e Geografia e Estatística (IBGE) from 1994 to 1998. He studied sociology, political science and public administration at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil (1958-1961), attended UNESCO's Latin American School of Social Sciences (FLACSO) in Santiago de Chile (1992-3), and obtained his Ph. D. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1973. He has lived in Rio de Janeiro since 1969, working and teaching at the Fundação Getúlio Vargas and, until 1988, at the Instituto Universitário de Pesquisas do Rio de Janeiro. He previously served as professor of political science at the Universidade de São Paulo, and a serior researcher at Fundação Getúlio Vargas. Before that, he was the research director of the Research Group on Higher Education at the Universidade de São Paulo. Short-term appointments and fellowships during these years included the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (1978), the Tinker Professorship of Latin American Studies at Columbia University (1986), a visiting professorship at the School of Education and the Center for Studies on Higher Education of the University of California, Berkeley (1985), the Institute of Advanced Studies of the Universidade de São Paulo (1987) and brief periods as visiting scholar at the École Pratique des Autes Études in Paris (1982/3), the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences in Uppsala (1986) and the St. Anthony’s College, Oxford (1994). He is a former President of the Brazilian Sociological Association and was chairman of the research group on the sociology of science and technology of the International Sociological Association; and is also member of the International Statistical Institute. He was for many years the editor of Dados—Revista de Ciências Sociais, and belongs to the editorial boards of several academic journals in Latin America and Europe.

His earlier work dealt with questions of political change in a historical and comparative perspective, with special emphasis on Brazil. More recently, he has worked with the sociological and political dimensions of the production of knowledge in science, technology and education. In 1985 he was the rapporteur of a Presidential Commission established by the Brazilian government to reorganize the country's higher education system, and in 1993/1994 he headed a working group commissioned by the Brazilian Ministry of Science and Technology and the World Bank to prepare a policy paper for Brazil's science and technology sector. The conclusions of this work were published in a three volume series by the Fundação Getúlio Vargas in Rio de Janeiro.

His main books include Bases do Autoritarismo Brasileiro, Editora Campus e Editora da Universidade de Brasília, 1982; A Space for Science: The Development of the Scientific Community in Brazil, The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991; The New Production of Knowledge (with Michael Gibbons, Camille Limoges, Helga Nowotny, Peter Scott and Martin Trow), SAGE, 1994; El futuro de la educación superior en America Latina, The Organization of American States, Washington, D. C., 1996; and A Redescoberta da Cultura, Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, 1997. He is the author of about two hundred publications in scholarly journals and collective books, and writes often in the Brazilian press. He his fluent in Portuguese, Spanish and English, and knows French. He is married to Inez Maria Farah, and has four children.