Disciplinary diversity and variety of activities will mark the first meeting of the Intercontinental Academia

The conference schedule for the first meeting of the Intercontinental Academia (ICA) has been set. The project is an initiative of the partnership between the IEA-USP and the Institute for Advanced Research of the Nagoya University, two members of the University-based Institutes for Advanced Study (UBIAS) network, and this first phase will be held in April (17-29). An embracing and innovative programme will include conferences, workshops, scientific and cultural tours, group activities and a debate on the future of universities.

The orientation of the research will be in charge of a senior scientific committee and more than 20 lecturers. The conferences will be an essential part of the activities of the meeting, since they will provide the 15 selected young researchers from nine countries (Germany, England, Finland, India, Japan, China, Taiwan, USA and Brazil) with different approaches of "time", the central theme of the project, from the perspectives of various areas of knowledge.

During the meeting in São Paulo and the second one, to be held in early 2016 in Nagoya, participants will prepare the content for a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), a virtual, free course of higher education. The structure and the programme of the course will be developed in São Paulo, while the detailed scripts of each theme will be elaborated in Nagoya. Between both immersion events in Brazil and in Japan participants shall remain in touch through the internet.

This meeting in São Paulo will be opened on April 17 by USP's president, Marco Antonio Zago, and by the provost for Research, José Eduardo Krieger.

On April 18, participants will go on a city tour in order to meet milestones of the influence of modernism in the architecture of USP and of the city. The activity, guided by the director of the IEA-USP, Martin Grossmann, will highlight the economic, social and cultural aspects involved in this influence.

In the morning of the next day there will be a visit to the outskirts of São Paulo, where the researchers will get information about social aspects of the city from four researchers: physiologist Ana Lydia Sawaya, from UNIFESP and coordinator of IEA-USP's Nutrition and Poverty Research Group, psychologist Sylvia Dantas, from UNIFESP and coordinator of IEA-USP's Intercultural Dialogues Research Group, public health specialist Fernando Mussa Abujamra Aith, from USP's Faculty of Medicine and member of the UNESCO Chair on Education for Peace, Human Rights, Democracy and Tolerance, based on the IEA-USP, and urbanist and public health expert Suzana Pasternak, from USP's Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism (FAU).

The first speaker will be physicist José Goldemberg, former minister of Education and former president of USP, who will give the master class of the programme on April 20. On the same day, there will be presentations by theoretical physicist Matthew Kleban, from the University of New York, sociologist Laymert Garcia dos Santos, from UNICAMP, chemist René Nome, from UNICAMP, and physicist Eliezer Rabinovici, from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

On April 21 there will be conferences with philosopher Sami Pihlström, director of the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, physiologist Carolina Escobar, from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), neurobiologist Ruud Buijs, also from the UNAM, astrophysicist Hideyo Kunieda, deputy president for Research at the Nagoya University, and chronobiologist Till Roenneberg, deputy director of the Institute of Medical Psychology of the Ludwig-Maximilians University (LMU) in Munich.

Biologist Vera Lúcia Imperatriz-Fonseca, from USP's Institute of Biosciences (IB) and the IEA-USP, ecologist Tiago Quental, also from the IB-USP, and astrophysicist Luiz Gylvan Meira Filho, a former visiting professor of the IEA-USP, will give a joint conference in the morning of April 22. Later, there will be presentations by anthropologist Karl-Heinz Kohl, director of the Frobenius Institute, Germany, and by biologist Takao Kondo, from the Nagoya University.

On April 23, a debate on the future of the university will be mediated by Hernan Chaimovich, president of CNPq and former deputy director of the IEA-USP. Marco Antonio Zago, president of USP, Carlos Vogt, president of UNIVESP, Klaus Capelle, president of UFABC, Naomar de Almeida Filho, former president of UFBA, and Luiz Bevilacqua, former president of UFABC, will be the debaters. This meeting will be condensed into a report to be produced by physicist Marcelo Knobel, from UNICAMP. The session will be broadcast online.

Psychoanalyst Leopold Nosek, in the morning, and a representative of Coursera, in the afternoon, will talk on April 25.

The last two days of talks (26 and 27) will feature anthropologist Massimo Canevacci, a professor of cultural anthropology, and art and digital cultures at the Università degli Studi di Roma La Sapienza, as well as a visiting professor at the IEA-USP, and physiologist Regina Pekelmann Markus, a professor at USP's Institute of Biosciences (IB) and member of IEA-USP's Board.