Why Brazil? Why Harvard? The DRCLAS Harvard Brazil Office at 20

For 20 years, the DRCLAS Harvard Brazil Office has helped answer those questions by building relationships between people and institutions across Harvard and Brazil. What began as a physical presence in São Paulo has grown into a foundation for research, teaching, student learning, public dialogue, and long-term collaboration across the country. 

The significance of that presence begins with Brazil itself. The largest country in Latin America, Brazil is an economic and geopolitical force, a major democracy, and a place where some of the defining questions of our time are playing out—from the future of democracy and sustainable development to public health, education, inequality, and the protection of the Amazon. 

“Brazil is an economic and geopolitical powerhouse in Latin America. It’s an extremely important democracy in the region,” said Steven Levitsky, DRCLAS Director. “One of the great things about the Brazil Office is that because it is so respected and so trusted in Brazil, it can serve as a hub for really important and interesting discussions across Brazil.” 

Harvard brings extraordinary intellectual resources to these questions. But meaningful international engagement requires more than expertise. It requires relationships, local knowledge, institutional trust, and sustained presence. For two decades, the DRCLAS Harvard Brazil Office has helped provide that connective infrastructure—helping Harvard faculty find collaborators, students encounter Brazil beyond the classroom, Brazilian scholars engage with Harvard, and institutions on both sides build partnerships that grow over time. 

What sustained engagement makes possible 

Some of the Brazil Office’s most enduring work demonstrates what can happen when those relationships are sustained over years. 

For more than a decade, the Harvard-Brazil Initiative on Early Childhood Development brought together Harvard and Brazilian collaborators to advance research, education, policy, and practice. Among the collaborations connected to this work is Núcleo Ciência Pela Infância (NCPI), co-founded with Harvard’s Center on the Developing Child, Fundação Maria Cecilia Souto Vidigal, Insper, and the University of São Paulo Medical School. Its flagship Executive Leadership Program on Early Childhood Development has trained more than 350 Brazilian policy and civil society leaders, with the goal of translating scientific knowledge into real-world impact. 

For Professor Dana McCoy, the Brazil Office’s role in making research possible has been equally tangible. 

“I think it is fair to say that without the Brazil Office I wouldn’t be doing research in Brazil,” McCoy said. “The Brazil Office has been really instrumental in helping me to make connections with academics and different organizations in Brazil and has been really helpful for acquiring funding and all of the supports necessary to do research [on early childhood development] in Brazil.” 

The exchange also runs in both directions. Through programs such as the Harvard Amazon Rainforest Immersion, students, faculty, and researchers from Harvard and the region learn together in the Amazon, engaging with local experts, researchers, and communities on questions ranging from biodiversity and climate policy to public health, inequality, and Indigenous and riverine knowledge. Across two editions, the program has offered participants an intensive, cross-disciplinary encounter with one of the world’s most consequential—and complex—regions. 

For students, a first experience in Brazil can similarly become the beginning of a much longer academic journey. 

Sophia Mills ’27 first traveled to Brazil to deepen her Portuguese through the Harvard Summer School Portuguese Immersion Program. She later returned through DRCLAS’s Summer Internship Program, working with Ação da Cidadania, and eventually made Brazil’s food systems the focus of her senior thesis. 

“Each time I returned to Brazil, I came back with new questions,” Mills said. “What began as an opportunity to improve my Portuguese became an interest in food security and public policy, and eventually the subject of my senior thesis. I don’t think I could have arrived at these questions without the experiences, relationships, and opportunities I found in Brazil.” 

Her experience captures something that is difficult to measure in a single program or semester: how sustained engagement can shape the questions students ask, the relationships they build, and the directions their academic work takes. 

Bringing research into public conversation 

The DRCLAS Harvard Brazil Office has also worked to extend academic knowledge beyond the University and connect Harvard research with broader conversations taking place in Brazil. 

Through its partnership with Nexo Políticas Públicas, the Brazil Office helps strengthen dialogue between Harvard scholars and Brazilian society, providing a platform for academic research to inform public debate on pressing national and global challenges. During the 2025–26 academic year, 12 Harvard-affiliated collaborators published 12 articles addressing topics including early childhood development, democracy, sustainability, and education. 

A six-part series developed in connection with the Lemann Dialogue, hosted by the DRCLAS Brazil Studies Program, explored the challenges, opportunities, and broader significance of Brazil’s six biomes: the Amazon, Atlantic Forest, Caatinga, Cerrado, Pampa, and Pantanal. 

The partnership represents another dimension of sustained engagement: not only creating opportunities for research and exchange but helping ideas travel beyond academic settings and become part of wider public conversations. 

Twenty years of connections 

These examples represent only a fraction of a network built over two decades. 

The DRCLAS Harvard Brazil Office has engaged 11 of Harvard’s 14 Schools, connected 350+ Harvard faculty with Brazil, supported 2,400+ student trips, welcomed 2,450 Brazilian visiting scholars and researchers, worked with 110+ partner institutions, and reached all 26 Brazilian states. 

These figures are conservative estimates based on available records, but they point to something larger than numbers: relationships built across disciplines, institutions, regions, and generations—and the research, learning, and collaboration those relationships have made possible. 

In August 2026, many of the people who have built and sustained that network came together in São Paulo to mark the DRCLAS Harvard Brazil Office’s 20th anniversary. 

During a week of events, the Brazil Office welcomed alumni, visiting scholars, students, advisers, partners, and friends for meetings, conversations, and moments of reflection. The week included gatherings at the Brazil Office, a celebratory event at Insper attended by more than 180 guests, and a Brazil Office Advisory Group meeting and anniversary lunch. 

Rather than marking the milestone through a single celebration, the week reflected the many communities that have shaped the Office’s first two decades. Alumni returned to a space that has connected them to Harvard in Brazil. Visiting scholars reflected on academic exchange and the value of institutional relationships. Students encountered the Office not only as a place, but as an invitation to imagine how their own work might engage with Brazil. 

“The Brazil Office has always been more than a physical space,” said Helena Monteiro, Brazil Office Executive Director. “It is a place where relationships are built over time, where ideas become collaborations, and where students, faculty, alumni, and partners find new ways to connect Harvard and Brazil. As we celebrate 20 years, we are also looking ahead with gratitude and renewed commitment to the work still to come.” 

That sustained presence has contributed to a broader transformation in Harvard’s relationship with Brazil. For Mark Elliott, Harvard’s Vice Provost for International Affairs, the Office’s impact is visible across the University. Over the past decade, he has seen a significant increase in the number of Brazilian students enrolled in degree programs throughout Harvard, along with a growing presence of Brazilian faculty in both senior and junior roles. He also points to the strength of Harvard’s alumni community across Brazil and the role the DRCLAS Harvard Brazil Office has played in deepening and enriching Harvard’s connection with the country. 

What becomes possible next? 

As the DRCLAS Harvard Brazil Office enters its third decade, the questions that shaped its first 20 years remain relevant: Where can Harvard’s research and educational strengths contribute to understanding some of Brazil’s most consequential challenges? What can Harvard learn from Brazilian scholars, institutions, and communities? And how can relationships built over decades create possibilities that neither side could realize alone? 

Those questions are also at the heart of the Brazil Office’s 20th anniversary video, launching during Beyond Borders: Building Bridges Between Harvard and Brazil , a Harvard Worldwide Week event. Through voices from faculty, students, alumni, partners, and friends, the video reflects on the people and ideas that have shaped the Office’s first two decades—and looks toward what might come next. 

For Marcia Castro, Chair of the Brazil Studies Program, that next chapter is about extending the network even further. 

“For the next twenty years, what I hope is that we can continue to support the connections we made, but we can build even more, so we can fully leverage all the potential that we have on both sides of the story. The potential that we have in Brazil that never thought about collaborating with Harvard, and the potential at Harvard, that never thought about studying Brazil.” 

Twenty years in, perhaps the clearest measure of the DRCLAS Harvard Brazil Office’s impact is not any single program, partnership, or number. It is the connections that exist because there has been a sustained presence to build them—and the research, learning, dialogue, and collaboration those connections continue to generate.