This free undergraduate course starts from an innovative educational plan, state-of-the-art infrastructure, and experience in CNPEM’s scientific environment from day one
EDUCATION
ILUM, A PIONEERING SCHOOL TO TRAIN A NEW GENERATION OF SCIENTISTS
An innovative undergraduate school to train future scientists engaged in interdisciplinary problem solving with a humanist, collaborative, and ethical vision based on solid theoretical training in mathematics and data science, and experimentation, with science from the very start: this is Ilum School of Science, an educational project launched in 2021 by the Brazilian Ministry of Education, with the first classes beginning on March, 2022.
Conceived over the past six years in dialogs and discussions among CNPEM’s researchers, members of the scientific community, and educators, the school aims to shorten the path between graduation, scientific production and research activity. Ilum provides its students with an environment where they are encouraged from early days to think of science as a whole, considering a scenario in which today’s great questions and challenges are increasingly thematic and involve a variety of scientific fields in an interdisciplinary manner.
At the end of the three-year course, graduates will be prepared to pursue careers on the frontiers of knowledge as scientists, academic researchers, in teaching, or in large domestic or international laboratories as specialists in data science or machine learning, or in their own businesses created through startups.
Students will be
able to follow
their career as
scientists, teachers,
researchers, in
large laboratories
or in their own
businesses
IMMERSION IN SCIENCE
One aspect that makes CNPEM’s school unique is that students will be involved in problem solving from their first academic term as they carry out projects and experiments in the school’s advanced laboratories, with gradual immersion in the Center’s environment of research and technological innovation where they can have direct contact with researchers, follow their work, and use state-of-the-art equipment in the country’s largest research infrastructure. The Bachelor’s Course in Science and Technology is free, with full-time classes, and the plan is to receive students from all over Brazil, who have a genuine vocation for science and pave the way for them to fully develop the capacity to seek solutions from their own innovative ideas.
WHY AN INNOVATIVE SCHOOL?
By Adalberto Fazzio
Director of Ilum School of Science
In summary, we seek to train young people as artisans of the future and creators of economic and social impacts. The instrument to achieve this objective is the creativity acquired through frontier research, essential for creating leaders capable of advancing scientific knowledge, suggesting innovative solutions and coordinating new groups and institutions.
Ilum School of Science is also innovative due to the early training of the researcher (the course lasts three years) and for offering social benefits (transport, food and housing) to all students. We highlight three axes that guide Ilum:
(i) a pedagogical-curricular change concerning the choice of courses and subjects to be taught; the immense stock of knowledge available today; the limited training time; and the requirement to prepare a professional capable of inserting himself in the complexity of the contemporary world;
(ii) Evolution in the didactic aspect, that is, in the form of transmission and absorption of knowledge. To this end, a new emphasis is given to the communication processes between teachers and students; group learning through projects and rapid assessment to test whether knowledge has been assimilated in the right way;
(iii) A practice of permanent integration between teaching, research and extension, encouraging the development of the “transcription” of research into impacts on society.
This axis will benefit from the possibilities that Ilum’s students will have getting involved in CNPEM’s research. In this way, we will have interdisciplinary learning of the contents of Life Sciences, Material Sciences, Mathematical and Computational Languages, and Humanities, with the expectation and security that the student will have the tools to develop their ability to solve real and complex problems.
Adalberto Fazzio is a member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences (ABC), was Dean of the Federal University of ABC, Director of the Physics Institute of the University of São Paulo – USP and Director of the Brazilian Nanotechnology National Laboratory/ LNNano – CNPEM.
He was also Undersecretary for Technological Development and Innovation at the MCTI and its research units. Fazzio holds a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Physics from the University of Brasília/UnB and a PhD in Physics from the University of São Paulo/USP.
His area of expertise is condensed matter physics, primarily aiming at understanding structural, magnetic and transport properties in materials. Adalberto currently works on the properties of nanomaterials and topological insulators.
With more than three hundred publications in specialized journals (10237 citations, Google; impact factor h = 56, Google), Fazzio has contributed with relevant works in the understanding of materials science and has active participation in the supervision of masters and doctors.
MEET A FEW STUDENTS FROM THE FIRST CLASS OF ILUM
MARCOS PIMENTEL
Curitiba, PR
“What makes Ilum a different school is its problem-solving teaching integrated with practice from the start.
My expectation with the course is that it will connect me with the world of research from the beginning so I can learn a lot about scientific production. I also try to broaden my horizons. I spent the last year studying a lot of Physics and Mathematics, and now I have the opportunity to learn more about other areas. My main interests are in Physics, and my goal is to work with that after I graduate.”
ISABELA BENETI
Presidente Prudente, SP
“Since elementary school, I stood out at school for being a curious student about the most diverse subjects, especially content related to natural sciences. This turned out to be a big problem in high school, where I had to determine what my degree course would be, that is, what subjects I would choose to pursue in my career. It was then that I learned, through my mathematics teacher, of the proposal for “Ilum: science school”, which promised not only interdisciplinary training but also total immersion in CNPEM and 100% student support (including housing, power, transport and notebook). Such a proposal was unlike any traditional course I had ever considered, and I doubtless picked it as my first choice.”
SARAH FREIRE
Fortaleza, CE
“My mother used to say that “speciality is for old people”, so I was motivated from an early age to explore different areas and to have interdisciplinarity as one of the pillars of my trajectory, winning gold medals in Robotics, Mathematics, Astronomy Olympiads, in addition to other awards in Chemistry and Informatics, and 3 calls for the international selections of Astronomy and Astronautics, all of this also taking courses in piano, theatre, ballet, English, French and German.
When I discovered ILUM, I was delighted. I am very excited to be part of an institution that combines science education and immersion in research and innovation in a state-of-the-art center (CNPEM), without losing sight of the humanities and humanization, a very rare proposal in Brazil.”
ENROLLED STUDENTS PROFILE
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