A colleague, friend and trusted advisor to many of us across the institute, Prof. Gabriela Dutrénit has worked with UNU-MERIT for decades, as a lecturer on our DEIP innovation workshops, and as a member of our International Advisory Board. In this brief portrait, Howard Hudson interviews Prof. Dutrénit to find out more about the woman behind the titles. … Born in 1957 in Uruguay, Gabriela has been an activist, community coordinator and human rights defender for almost half a century. A leader of...

Walking 4 SDGs UNU-MERIT staff and students travel virtually to Instituto Terra, Brazil, in support of SDG13 Enter keywords...

MPP alumnus Rodolpho Zannin Feijó joined the first online edition of the Maastricht University Alumni Week last month as a guest speaker from his home city of Curitiba in Brazil. During a lively conversation with current and prospective students, he shared his experience as head of the city’s International Affairs Office and looked back on his Master’s studies in Maastricht. Here are six highlights from the conversation. A double-degree from United Nations University and Maastricht University ha...

While the rise of populist politicians in the Europe and the US gets a lot of attention from the media and researchers alike, the drivers of the populism taking hold in emerging and developing economies still receives relatively little scrutiny. In a new working paper we provide new evidence tracing the rise of populism in Brazil – through both the victory of presidents Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in 2002 and Jair Bolsonaro in 2018 – to regional economic shocks caused by a process of trade liberal...

We are delighted to announce that Dr. Carlos Cadena Gaitán, a graduate of our PhD programme, has been named Transport Secretary for the City of Medellín, Colombia. Dr. Cadena Gaitán is a well-known transport and environmental activist. He is co-founder of La Ciudad Verde (the Green City) initiative, project coordinator of the Low Carbon City Forum, and various other artistic and cultural organisations. In recognition of his work, he received the ‘Future Sustainability Leader’ award in Oslo in Ju...

I previously worked at the UN ECLAC in Santiago de Chile, in a division that has partnered with UNU-MERIT on various projects. For two years I worked under Mario Cimoli, who used to be a colleague of UNU-MERIT Director, Bart Verspagen. It was Mario who first told me about the programme. Then Alejandro Lavopa, a PhD fellow at UNU-MERIT at the time, visited ECLAC and suggested that I apply for the PhD programme. So I learned about it by word of mouth....

“We must build bridges, meet the different actors working in the country by developing different forms of science communication – journalism, dissemination, education – and enrich each other from these differences.” Prof. Daniela Hirschfeld ...

The Peruvian in-service programme is a nationwide intervention intended to improve teachers’ ability to perform, and its final objective is to increase student achievement. The programme, delivered since 2008, includes a three-year systematic process of monthly meetings with a supervisor (coach), which usually take the form of personal coaching, workshops and conferences. During those meetings, the coach discusses directly how to improve with the selected teachers and suggests pedagogical proces...

"I was really happy to be there for three days, sitting down not only with researchers but also communicators and journalists. It was a really nice experience to work with them, to understand what are the best ways to communicate with society. Not only our results but also our passion, our emotion and our vulnerability – and the fact that we researchers are also human, so people can identify with us... It also helped us to understand how we can tell stories better visually, not only in terms of ...

My research was about a set of public policies to support the semiconductor industry in Brazil. These policies started to be designed in the early 2000s, when it was identified that developing a semiconductor industry in the country would foster innovation in the electronics industry. The latter was already present in the country, but it focused on assembling goods and relied on imported components to do so. Thus, several complementary policies were put in place over the years, including a state...