Antonio Meirelles
Antonio Jose de Almeida Meirelles took office as the 13th rector of the State University of Campinas (Unicamp) on April 19, 2021. He was appointed to the position by the governor of São Paulo, after winning the Unicamp community consultation and heading the triple list drawn up by the Council University (Consu).
Before arriving at the Rectory, Meirelles held other administrative positions at Unicamp. He was a member of the faculty group at Consu, director of the Faculty of Food Engineering (FEA) and associate coordinator of the Nucleus of Studies and Research in Food (NEPA). At FEA, the unit in which he is a full professor, he also held the position of associate coordinator for Undergraduate Studies, associate coordinator for Extension and graduate coordinator.
Meirelles completed both his undergraduate (1980) and master's (1984) in Food Engineering at FEA. He then held two doctorates. The first, in Thermal Process Engineering, was defended in 1987 at the Technische Hochschule Merscburg, now part of Martin Luther University Halle-Wittemberg, Germany. He completed the second, in Economic Sciences, ten years later (1997), at the Institute of Economics (IE) at Unicamp. His engineering research focuses on the areas of bioenergy, biorefineries and purification processes for food and agro-industrial products. The technology developed as part of his doctorate abroad earned him the 1989 Young Scientist Award, granted by the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq), and is currently responsible for around 30% of Brazilian production of anhydrous alcohol. In economics, his main subjects of study are monetary theory and the development of macroeconomic models.