PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Now in its fourth year, the Brown International Advanced Research Institutes (BIARI) is centered around four two-week intensive institutes, convened concurrently by Brown faculty, in which participants and leading scholars in their fields share their research and develop new collaborative projects through sustained, high-level dialogue spanning disciplines and continents. This year's 140 participants and 30 visiting faculty represent more than 45 countries, including Brazil, China, Nigeria, India and Ethiopia. Participants were chosen from a pool of more than 850 applicants.

The topics of this year's institutes are:

• Global health and HIV/AIDS: cutting edge issues for underserved populations;
• Theater and civil society: politics, public space and performance;
• Population and development: new approaches to enduring global problems;
• Climate change and its impacts: regional approaches.

Each institute is designed as an intensive two-week residential workshop, organized as a mix of lectures, roundtable discussions, group work, field trips, and social interactions.

Sovereign|Santander and Brown University sponsor BIARI. Keith Brown, associate professor of international studies (research), is BIARI’s director, with oversight from Matthew Gutmann, Brown’s vice president for international affairs.

In the first three years of operation, BIARI welcomed 400 participants from more than 220 institutions and 76 countries to Brown’s campus to lay the groundwork for longer-term exchanges between individuals, teams, and institutions. In February 2012, Brown and Sovereign|Santander signed a memorandum of understanding to provide support for an additional three years of BIARI.