NEES leaders tighten the relationship with the MIT research center created by Economics Nobel Prize laureates

From left to right: Diego, Leonardo, Ig, and Seiji attended the meeting at J-Pal’s headquarters in Cambridge.

Elaborating public policies from information, data, and research that allow the increase of opportunities and quality of Brazilian public education. To achieve this goal, the Center for Excellence in Social Technologies (NEES) is tightening its partnership with institutions such as the research center J-PAL (Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab), which is headquartered in the Economics Department of the Technology Institute of Massachusetts (MIT).

J-PAL is becoming a reference in the evaluation of science-based social programs, achieving prominence, especially after co-founder and directors of the institution, Abhijit Banerjee e Esther Duflo, alongside affiliate professor Michael Kremer, received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2019. The acknowledgment was achieved due to the researchers’ experimental approach to reducing global poverty, which has contributed to transforming how specialists in the field conceive social and economic development policies.

A delegation of NEES researchers was reunited with J-PAL representatives this Monday, June 20th, in Cambridge, United States. Among the topics discussed were the need to institutionalize, in Brazil, a culture of elaboration of evidence-based public policies, as well as the challenge of implementing methodologies to rigorously assess the efficacy of new policies and existing programs.

Among those in the meeting were NEES director, Ig Ibert Bittencourt, from the Computing Institute of the Federal University of Alagoas (UFAL); Diego Dermeval, from the Medicine Faculty of UFAL; Leonardo Brandão Marques, from the Education Center of UFAL; and Seiji Isotani, from the Mathematical and Computer Sciences Institute (ICMC) of USP, in São. They were hosted by Samuel Wolf, assistant to the Global Executive Director of J-PAL, and Margaret Andersen, senior associate of J-PAL in the political sector, acting specifically in the education field.

J-Pal’s Samuel Wolf and Margaret Andersen (left) welcome the NEES researchers.

Text: Denise Casatti – NEES/UFAL Communication Department

More information
J-PAL website: https://www.povertyactionlab.org/
NEES/UFAL Communication Department: (11) 9.9125.9459
Email: denise.casatti@nees.ufal.br