With this New Year Message, I greet the entire B-MRS community in Brazil and abroad.
There is great expectation that in 2019 Brazil will resume its investments in science, technology and innovation, which we believe to be minimally necessary for the continuation of our system, developed with tremendous effort over the last decades. For the meeting that the academic community had with the future minister of science and technology in early December 2018, the main suggestion B-MRS sent was about reinstating the budget in the area. It is known that Brazil needs to invest much more in the generation of knowledge to solve its serious economic and social problems. Reinstating the budget is merely the first and most urgent step given the situation of universities and research centers in the country. Also important and part of B-MRS ‘s suggestions is the emphasis on partnerships between ministries to address the problems of society at large, which always entail knowledge, technology and innovation, and the search for synergy with the private sector to transform knowledge into wealth and social well-being.
The materials area in particular has proved to be essential for any and all development. From fundamental discoveries of basic science for the understanding of nature and the conquest of space, to applications in medicine and agriculture, areas that today advance significantly from new materials and methodologies created to study them. In Brazil, for example, the inauguration of the first phase of Sirius, a new source of synchrotron light, at the National Center for Research in Energy and Materials, revealed a masterpiece of materials science and engineering. Even more relevant is that much of this technology is Brazilian.
B-MRS has continuously strived to provide space for researchers from Brazil and abroad to communicate and discuss their scientific and technological contributions and to seek partnerships for new challenges in a highly multidisciplinary field. Our last meeting in Natal (RN), in September 2018, repeated the success of previous editions with this perspective. Some of the many advances in materials science and technology have been highlighted in the B-MRS Newsletters, as a sample of the quality work being done in Brazil. B-MRS also considers scientific dissemination as strategic. In 2018 it created a new section of the Newsletter, entitled “From idea to innovation,” with special reports on the effect of technologies that reached society.
I end by thanking the B-MRS community, wishing all much health and success in 2019, and hoping to meet many of you in our next Meeting at Balneário Camboriú (SC), September 22-26.
Professor Osvaldo Novais de Oliveira Junior
President of B-MRS
