Brazil’s Young Scientist Prize Names Climate-Focused Winners in Brasília

Overview

• First-place awards went to Elizângela Aparecida dos Santos (Mestre e Doutor), Manuelle da Costa Pereira (Higher Education) and Raul Victor Magalhães Souza (High School).
• Raul’s Ceará project blends the knowledge of six traditional rain forecasters with machine learning and Funceme/Inmet records from 1981–2024, reporting 94.5% accuracy, five times higher than conventional monitoring.
• Manuelle’s Kit Solar Castanheiro is a portable, recyclable-material solar system for Amazon nut harvesters that cuts diesel dependence and reduces equipment volume from 1,000 liters to 50 liters, with recent visibility at COP30 in Belém.
• Elizângela devised a three-component methodology with 30 environmental, socioeconomic and demographic indicators to map municipal climate resilience, identifying stronger cases concentrated in Brazil’s Northeast.
• Organized by CNPq and Fundação Roberto Marinho with Shell as master sponsor and media support from Editora Globo and Canal Futura, the edition recognized 10 researchers and two institutions from 919 submissions, also honoring Ana Paula Melo, UFRJ and Escola Técnica Estadual Professor Paulo Freire.