Vale and the government of Pará yesterday (May 16) laid the foundation stone of the Vale Technology Institute (ITV) centre in Belém, Brazil, which will be dedicated to medium- and long-term research into sustainable development. The facility will have around 300 in-house and visiting professionals, including Brazilian researchers and professors, and foreign academics with doctorates and post-doctorates. Some R$162 million will be invested to build the centre. The facility, scheduled to be inaugurated in 2013, will cover 140,000 m2 in the Guamá Science and Technology Park. In October of this year, ITV will set up temporarily in a 2,100 m2building, also in Belém.
The Belém centre is one of three that ITV is building in Brazil. The others will be in Ouro Preto (Minas Gerais) and São José dos Campos (São Paulo), and will specialise in mining and low-carbon energy, respectively.
“The ITV facility in Belém will be a world-class centre of excellence, projecting Belém’s image as a major hub for Brazilian science and technology,” says ITV Director-President, Luiz Mello. The Director of the ITV unit in Pará is Professor Luiz Carlos Silveira, who has a medical degree from the Federal University of Pará (UFPA), a doctorate in biophysics from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) and a post-doctorate in neuroscience from Oxford University. Silveira is an associate professor at UFPA, where he founded the Postgraduate Program in Neuroscience and Cellular Biology and ran the Tropical Medicine Centre. He has extensive experience in the science and technology community as a member of CNPq’s Advisory Committee and the Advisory Group of the International Cooperation Department of CAPES. “Luiz Carlos exemplifies one of ITV’s objectives, which is to invest in local talent, alongside another strategy, which is to bring Brazilian researchers back from abroad and attract international talent to the country,” adds Mello.
The ITV centre in Belém was designed by architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha, the winner of the 2006 Pritzker Prize, the most prestigious architectural award in the world. Completely sustainable, enabling water to be reused and cutting energy consumption, the design is inspired by the traditional riverside buildings of Brazil’s Amazon region.
“The entire design was subject to the important phenomenon of waters that rise and flood areas, including dense jungle. The steel structures will be suspended in a ‘dry’ building, and may be transported along the highway in clearly configured, manufactured pieces, without the need for traditional building techniques involving the use of water, stone and cement. Suspended over the Guamá River, the centre will have a minimal impact on the local environment, respecting the flow of waters. Once the centre is completed, the whole area will become a unique museum of environmental preservation,” explains the architect.
The Vale Technology Institute is a nonprofit institution conceived by Vale. Its mission is to create future options through scientific research and the development of technologies in order to expand Vale’s knowledge and business frontiers in a sustainable manner. Through this initiative, Vale aims to expand scientific research output and technology-based economic development in Brazil, as well as generating and spreading knowledge to spur socioeconomic, environmental and mining industry-related development in the country.
Since it was launched in 2009, ITV has distributed more than 100 MA and PhD scholarships. Recently, the Institute made an agreement with the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) to offer postgraduate scholarships to Mozambicans at Brazilian universities, and also has agreements with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland.
In addition, ITV has established partnerships with the state research foundations of Minas Gerais, São Paulo and Pará, involving a total investment of R$120 million, to promote science and technology research projects in mining, energy, eco-efficiency, biodiversity and steelmaking processes. This is the largest public-private research partnership ever seen in Brazil.
