Brazil

UiO cooperates with Brazilian partners in a wide range of research fields as well as in course development and student exchange. Major focus areas are: the changing energy landscape, biodiversity, geophysics, robotics, health and social sciences. Several of UiO's researchers are involved in innovative partnerships linking education and research cooperation with industry.

Research collaboration - some examples

Sustainable Energy

UiO established and coordinates an alliance of Norwegian and leading Brazilian universities and research institutes within the field of energy, as a platform to further develop research and higher education cooperation and links with industry in Brazil. 

With its Norwegian and Brazilian partners, UiO has organised the November Conference in Rio de Janeiro annually since 2013. The conference's original focus on oil and gas research has been expanded from 2019 to cover energy research in general, with a stronger focus on interdisciplinary approaches and renewable energy. 

"DSYNE," a project based at UiO's SIRIUS Centre for Scaleable Data Access and funded by the Research Council of Norway's INTPART programme, involves a network of computer scientists and system engineers in Norway: University of Oslo (UiO) and University of Southern Norway (USN); in Brazil: Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) and Federal University of Espírito Santo (UFES); and in USA: University of Houston and Stevens Institute of Technology. The project carries out research, education and innovation in digital requirements management in engineering, whereby semantic technologies are used to describe requirements in a truly digital way, so that they can be shared in databases and used for automated reasoning and validation and potentially change the way requirements are managed and transmitted in the natural resources industry. 

GlobOil, a project coordinated by the TIK Centre (UiO) and funded by the Research Council of Norway's Petromax II programme, studies how Norwegian upstream oil and gas suppliers are adapting their production strategy, supply chains and innovative capabilities to the demands of recent development in global manufacturing. Activities involve a consortium made up of TIK with NIBR at OsloMet (Norway), University of Chicago (USA), and Universidade Candido Mendes (Brazil). 

Physics of Geological processes

COLOSSAL is a project coordinated by the NJORD Centre at UiO, combining Geosciences with Physics. It is funded by the Norwegian Research Council's INTPART-programme and aims to build the educational and research framework necessary to develop a world-leading collaboration on fluid flow in porous and fractured media, with applications to groundwater, geohazards, georesources, and environmental science, based on network of University of Oslo partners including, in Brazil: the Federal University of Paraná (UPR) and the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPe); in France: University of Grenoble and University of Rennes; and in USA: University of Southern California and University of Minnesota. 

Biodiversity 

UiO established (2013) and coordinates the Biodiversity Research Consortium (BRC), for research collaboration in the field of biodiversity and climate in the East Amazon region. UiO's consortium partners are: Hydro AS in Brazil, Federal University of Pará (UFPA), Federal Rural University of the Amazon (UFRA) and Museu Paraense Emilio Go?ldi (MPEG). UiO runs and is involved in a large number of projects through our Natural History Museum, as well as through the Department of Geoscieces. Projects generally combine ongoing research cooperation with activities furthering cooperation within education, and are either jointly funded by the consortium partners or through national funding agencies in Norway and Brazil.  In 2020 UiO gained an new 5-year INTPART-project funded by the Research Council of Norway within Biodiversity SAMBA: Scaling Advanced Methods for Biodiversity Assessments; De Boer, Hugo in partnership with UFPA, Instituto Tecnologico Vale, and the Norwegian University of Life Sciences. 

Health and Medicine

UiO has since 2015 developed a partnership within research and education on mother-and-child health as well as pharmaco- and genetic epidemiology, with funding from the INTPART-programme at RCN for network projects with Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) and partners in Canada, USA, France and South Africa (Pharmatox (2015-2019) and iAPOGEE 2021-2026).

UiO has also developed a long term partnership in education, research and innovation with the University of Campinas (UNICAMP) in Brazil and partners in Canada, USA and India, within biofilm and antimicrobial resistance: dentistry/oral biology (RESISPART 2018-2022, and 2021-2026).

Combining collaboration in education and research

UiO's collaboration with Brazilian partners including the above, is growing and dynamic and largely involves cooperative projects with activities combining ongoing research and education, as well as individual researcher-to-researcher collaboration. Short-term researcher and student exchange at all levels from bachelor to postdoc level, and course development based on ongoing research cooperation form the basis for long-term institutional partnerships with Brazil's leading universities, and provide platforms for funding from multiple sources. Such partnerships, with funding from the Research Council of Norway and DIKU's funding programmes INTPART and/or UTFORSK, have been developed within a range of fields, for instance with the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) within: robotics (COINMAC); big data (Digital Geosciences); with the Federal University of Pará within geosciences (Geosource) and biodiversity (BRC, SAMBA,Geological resources and sustainable development - learning to live in a finite world and development of a masters course in Tropical rainforest ecology and biodiversity with the University of Ouro Preto (UFOP) within science education (Math and the City) and new 2020-UTFORSK-projects within special education (with UFBahia) and Psychology (UFPernambuco).

Brazilian partners

UiO has bilateral agreements and MOU's with Brazil's leading universities. Some of these include student exchange agreements.

This tiny wasp (appx. 3 mm) was discovered in Brazil 2014. This is part of the project Biodiversity in the Amazon, a cooperation between UiO, Norsk Hydro, The Federal University of Pará (UFPA), The Emilio Goeldi museum of Pará (MPEG) and The Federal Rural University of the Amazon (UFRA). Photo: César Favacho (MPEG).
 

Funding programmes for institutional cooperation

Centres and networks

  • NorLARNet (Norwegian Latin-America Research Network)

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