Since 2009, Brown University and Santander Bank have provided two-week intensive summer institutes for promising young scholars from around the world. On Monday, Nov. 24, 2014, the partners committed to provide the Brown International Advanced Research Institutes (BIARI) for another three years.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Brown University President Christina Paxson and Roman Blanco, president and chief executive officer of Santander Bank and Santander Holdings USA, signed an agreement Monday, Nov. 24, 2014, for an additional three years of support for the Brown International Advanced Research Institutes (BIARI).

Co-sponsored by Brown and Santander, the program convenes promising young scholars from around the world each summer to share research, engage in a high-level intellectual and policy dialogue, and build scholarly networks to foster long-term collaborations.

BIARI began as a small pilot project in 2008 and officially launched in 2009. In the years since, 853 scholars and practitioners from 101 countries have participated in the two-week intensive summer institutes designed and taught at Brown by the Watson Institute for International Studies. Organized by discipline and designed and run by recognized scholars, each institute addresses cutting-edge questions of academic fields. For the 2015 session, the institutes will include humanitarian response and post-conflict reconstruction; ethnicity, conflict, and inequality in global perspective; governance and development in the age of globalization; and population and development: new approaches to enduring global problems.

The signing of the renewal agreement took place in the Watson Institute’s Kim Koo Library and was attended by representatives from Santander and the Brown faculty.