Simon Schwartzman

Simon Schwartzman is a research associate at the Instituto de Estudos de Política Econômica / Casa das Garças in Rio de Janeiro.

He was born in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. He studied sociology, political science and public administration at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil (1958-1961), attended UNESCO’s Latin American School of Social Sciences (FLACSO) in Santiago de Chile (1962-3), and obtained his Ph. D. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1973. He is a member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences, and a recipient of the Brazilian Order of Scientific Merit.

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 was a professor of political science at the Universidade de São Paulo, and, between 1999 and 2002, director of the American Institutes for Research for Brazil. From May 1994 to December 1998, was President of Brazil’s Institute of Geography and Statistics (Fundação IBGE). Before that, he was the research director of the Research Group on Higher Education at the Universidade de São Paulo.

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.