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The Canadian university presidents’ mission to Brazil has wrapped up, and now follow-up begins.

Canadian presidents have pledged to return again to Brazil – to follow up, keep learning, and to deepen the partnerships that have been built over the past days. They’ll be followed by others from their institutions, especially faculty members and students, who will be making the lasting “person-to-person” connections.

In total, Canada’s universities signed 75 formal partnerships, agreements and scholarship programs while in Brazil, worth about $6.7 million. Mission participants also laid the foundation for strong collaboration on Brazil’s ambitious Science without Borders program, which will see more than 100,000 Brazilian undergraduates, PhD and postdoctoral students fan out worldwide over the next few years to widen their knowledge and their horizons.

While the AUCC delegation was in Brazil, its president Dilma Rousseff announced that her country will allocate up to 12,000 of those Science without Borders students to Canada – the second highest number after the United States, which will receive about 16,000.

“We”ve seen a lot of delegations come before who are interested in Science without Borders,” said Carlos Nobre, national secretary in Brazil’s Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation. “But we’ve never had 30 university presidents. I’m very impressed.”

So what are the highlights of the Brazil mission? Certainly, for the university presidents who took part, the days were full. Up most days for a 7 a.m. briefing, we visited university campuses, research labs and government offices. In each one, we were warmly received (almost invariably meeting someone who had studied or conducted research in Canada at some point in their academic careers.)

Meetings often extended until late in the evening – and as always I was impressed by the energy, commitment and global outlook of Canada’s university presidents.

The connections that were made – and that already existed – are real. At the Brazil synchrotron near UNICAMP, we met a University of Guelph researcher collaborating on a research project, and watched as the president of the University of Saskatchewan, Peter MacKinnon, linked Brazil’s synchrotron with Canada’s, which is located at the U of S, for an experiment across borders. At Universidade de Brasilia, meanwhile, the head of its Institute for Sustainability announced proudly that he had done his PhD at the Université du Québec à Montréal. And at the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation, we met a researcher who had just returned from Montreal, where she had been working with Canadian colleagues on new ocean technologies.

Everywhere we went, we met students keen to study at Canadian universities. In fact, Canada was described by the rector of the Universidade de Brasilia as one of the top “dream countries” for Brazilian students.

This fall, some of those Brazilian students will set foot in Canadian university classrooms for the first time. If the energy for collaboration we saw in Brazil last week is any indication, they will be followed by many more.

We also saw first-hand the remarkable commitment of Brazil’s private sector to research and innovation – where companies donate one percent of total revenues to research, and where the private sector contributed an additional 26,000 scholarships to the Science without Borders program.

The AUCC mission to Brazil was unprecedented in its size and scope, and it demonstrated the value to both countries of international research collaboration and faculty and student mobility. “We don’t talk about brain drain or brain gain anymore,” Dr. Nobre told us. “We talk about brain circulation. We want to open up Brazil to international collaboration on a vastly larger scale than before.”

University education, research and innovation are clearly on the rise in Brazil – and those of us on the AUCC mission came away deeply impressed by the immense and inspiring ambition and pace of Brazil’s progress.

Now it’s all about making things happen.

Ensuring that the 75 agreements signed this past week between Canadian university presidents and their Brazilian counterparts lead to action and yield results has been a recurring theme of the Brazil mission. But perhaps that need was not stressed as strongly or at such a high level before as it was yesterday at the Presidential Palace in Brasilia.

That’s where St. Francis Xavier University President Sean Riley signed an agreement between the university’s Coady International Institute and Brazil’s Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais. Participating in the signing and making remarks was Gilberto Carvalho, Chief Minister of the General Secretariat of the Presidency. Minister Carvalho expressed a deep commitment to the values being put into action through the StFX partnership.

L to R: Rocksane de Carvalho Norton, vice-president of the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Gilberto Carvalho, chief minister of the General Secretariat of the Presidency, Sean Riley, president, St. Francis Xavier University and in the background, Jamal Khokhar, the Canadian ambassador. © Rildo Borges

It’s a partnership focused on sustainable community development and democratic participation. “Today it is our honour to have this agreement,” said Minister Carvalho, “because we’re talking about the construction of democracy.” And that’s a value Brazilians hold dear.

He said democracy, which Brazilians fought for the in the 1960s and 1970s, can only be fully achieved when the people have both the right to participate in that democracy as well as the education and training that makes them able to participate. He said Brazil’s fight against dictatorship proved to be “a good training ground for democratic leadership in Brazil.

“We also have an open mind with respect to the ideas of others and we need to learn more,” the minister added. And that‘s where the Coady Institute comes in.

Over the past 50 years, the Coady has provided community development training to 6,000 graduates from 130 countries. Among other things, this new agreement will provide opportunities for social organization leaders in Brazil to gain practical training at the institute on the StFX campus in Antigonish, Nova Scotia.

In talking about what StFX and the Coady Institute have to offer, Dr. Riley said, “Probably our greatest interest is in the grassroots development of leaders; the development of leaders from the ground up and not necessarily from the top down.”

Canada’s ambassador to Brazil, Jamal Khokhar, also stressed the importance of moving from words to action. He said the StFX agreement demonstrates how Canada and Brazil can “work together in a spirit of cooperation, generosity and support for our shared role in building an active, capable and engaged citizenry.”

Minister Carvalho invited Ambassador Khokhar to join him in personally monitoring the success of this university partnership as it moves now from words to action.

Our agenda is an ambitious one during the Canadian university presidents’ mission in Brazil, so we are trying to maximize every moment – fill the “unforgiving minute” with 60 seconds of distance run, as the saying goes.

And so it was on a bus ride from one stop to the next here in Brasilia, that I had a chance to speak with Jim Dean, the executive director of the University of Manitoba’s international office. Jim himself has squeezed in a lot on this trip. In addition to accompanying the University of Manitoba’s president David Barnard for certain portions of the mission, Jim had just joined us again after spending some time in Campo Grande, a city in the west of Brazil, visiting with one of the U of M’s partners, Dom Bosco Catholic University.

I had certainly been aware of this innovative initiative developed by these two universities – it is one among the 55 great active projects funded through AUCC’s Students for Development program, but it was nice to get an update from Jim on how things were progressing.

Their arrangement will see a total of 18 U of M students over the next three years spend up to six months working with the university and its community partner on social development amongst indigenous people in the Mato Grosso do Sul region of Brazil. The University of Manitoba will also be receiving Brazilian students over the same period to work on engagement with First Nations people in Manitoba.

In our chat on the bus, Jim spoke eloquently about the two universities’ commitment to the global effort to improve the lives of indigenous people. Manitoba’s project with Dom Bosco is yet another example of how Canadians and Brazilians can learn from each other and create alliances of shared purposes such as in this case, striving for social equality for indigenous populations.‪‬‬

There is no end to the fascinating ways Canadian universities are engaging with Brazilian partners through ever-deeper and stronger partnerships.

Separated by thousands of kilometres, researchers on two continents took a step closer to understanding Crohn’s disease on Saturday.

University of Saskatchewan President Peter MacKinnon was in Brazil’s Synchrotron Light Laboratory, located in Campinas near the mega-city of São Paolo. On the computer screens in front of him were some familiar faces – researchers back home at the University of Saskatchewan’s Canadian Light Source synchrotron.

His Excellency, the Right Hon. David Johnston, Governor General and to his left , Peter MacKinnon, president of the University of Saskatchewan, participating in a live experiment done in conjunction with the Canadian Light Source Sychrotron in Saskatoon © MCpl Dany Veillette, Rideau Hall.

I watched Prof. MacKinnon wave to his colleagues. Then I turned to see the image of a piece of intestine from a Crohn’s disease patient, on the computer screens in Campinas. It had been sent using the Saskatoon beamline, with the help of new software developed at the Canadian synchrotron. In moments, the Brazilian researchers had started experimental scans of the tissue samples and began analyzing the resulting data.

“This is an amazing example of new opportunities for research and collaboration available to scientists and graduate students,” Prof. MacKinnon commented. (He had conducted the same experiment earlier in the day, under the watchful eyes of Canada’s Governor General, His Excellency the Right Honourable David Johnston.)

The experiment was part of a tour of Brazil’s synchrotron for some 30 Canadian university presidents, who are here to build research and mobility links with colleagues in Brazil. During the mission, the Canadian presidents have signed some 75 agreements to solidify their partnerships with Brazilian colleagues.

Brazilian Synchrotron Light Laboratory in Campinas, Brazil. © MCpl Dany Veillette, Rideau Hall.

Before visiting the synchrotron, the Canadians had been to the nearby Campinas university known as UNICAMP, a high tech university that spares no effort to attract the top Brazilian and international students and faculty.

Linking the synchrotrons brings benefits to both Brazil and Canada, Prof. MacKinnon told me. “It’s tremendously efficient. A company in Saskatoon that wants to do a certain kind of research, for which we don’t have the right kind of beam lines, can now use the synchrotron in Brazil.”

So instead of Canada needing to build a whole new beamline for its synchrotron, researchers can join forces through this kind of international collaboration.

Synchrotrons are used particularly by researchers and companies working in the biosciences and nanomaterials.

While at the Brazil synchrotron, I also met up with Stefan Kycia, a professor of physics at the University of Guelph who is working with colleagues at Brazil and Canada’s synchrotrons on a project known as the Brockhouse Sector (named after Canadian Nobel prize winning physicist and McMaster University professor, the late Bertram Brockhouse). The project aims to establish a cutting-edge x-ray scattering presence that will support experiments by scientists in areas such as physics, chemistry, environmental science and geology.

“We’re not just collaborating for fun,” said Dr. Kycia. “It’s necessary for survival” in a big science world. Funding for the Brockhouse project has come from Canada’s federal government, provincial governments including Ontario and Quebec, IBM and Petrobras.

“Instead of duplicating our efforts, we are using each other’s capacities and that just makes sense,” Dr. Kycia added.

As for the Brazilians, they were impressed by the size of the Canadian university delegation, and its serious intent. The Brazilians mean business, too. They’re planning to build an even more powerful state-of-the-art synchrotron called Sirius, which they expect will be ready by 2016.

Why that date? They plan to use their new synchrotron to light the Olympic torch, which will make its way to Brazil in four years. Brazil’s scientists expect to be ready for it.

Mamdouh Shoukri, York University president, shares his impressions of the Brazil mission. He looks forward to expanding already existing relations between Canadian and Brazilian students and researchers.