‘It’s incredible to see what IMPA has become’, says Cristina Perez

“It’s amazing to see what IMPA has become. Remembering when we met him as a little boy and seeing everything he has become today. […] If the institute had been under direct administration, would it have gotten to where it is today? Certainly not!”. The statement was made by Cristina Perez, former advisor to the Executive Secretariat and former head of the Center for Coordination, Supervision and Monitoring of Social Organizations at MEC, in the third episode of the series “25 years of transformation: IMPA as a Social Organization”. The conversation with the director-general, Marcelo Viana, was aired this Monday (13) on the institute’s Youtube channel.

Cristina recalled the period in which she met Minister Luiz Carlos Bresser-Pereira and Secretary Ângela Santana – central figures in the transformation of the institute to the OS model and also interviewed in the series. According to her, the implementation process was full of challenges: internal resistance, distrust of control agencies and budgetary difficulties. IMPA’s management contract was signed in September 2000, but it was not until the following year that it received the first funds. “In the beginning it was complicated: it was a large budget, with a lot of flexibility and its own purchasing regulations. Everything was very new, which generated a lot of mistrust.”

Over time, important adjustments were made. The evaluation committee, initially formed by specialists from other areas, began to have mathematicians appointed by CNPq, which allowed the institute’s performance to be evaluated more fairly. “I remember our first meeting of the evaluation committee. We didn’t give ten to IMPA, but we changed the final grade right away. We didn’t have experts on the commission, we had Eloy Garcia, who I think was a biologist. Hence, the number of articles published in top journals did not reach the goal at the time. Later, Jacob Palis [IMPA’s director-general at the time] showed up with I don’t know how many more articles up his sleeve. We accepted and IMPA got a score of 10. It was then that we saw that we needed to get the specialists for the evaluation committee and we started to look for these people in the CNPq evaluation committees”, he recalled.

The interview series, which aired from October 6, also had the participation of economist and former Minister of Science and Technology and former Minister of Federal Administration and State Reform Luiz Bresser-Pereira, and former Secretary of State Reform at the Ministry of Federal Administration and State Reform (MARE) and current advisor to the general coordination of Capes and president of the Association of Servers of the institution, Angela Maria Santana Carvalho. Check out all the episodes here.

The next episode will be with José Fernando Perez, a member of IMPA’s Board of Directors since 2000 and president since 2023. The interview will air next Monday (20) and ends the commemorative series for the institute’s 25th anniversary as a Social Organization.