Frederico’s work sits at the crossroads of several fields he’s spent his career thinking through — not as abstractions, but as questions he’s had to answer in practice: in a grant committee room, in a refugee camp classroom, in a foreign ministry, and at his own writing desk.
International Education
From negotiating a $4.2 billion scholarship program at Brazil’s Foreign Ministry to designing an academic freedom initiative that now spans five regions, Frederico has spent nearly two decades treating international education as a strategic instrument — for peace, development, and justice, not just individual opportunity. He writes and speaks regularly on the future of cross-border academic cooperation, most recently in “The University Opportunity” (2024).
Knowledge Economy
Frederico is interested in how societies decide what counts as valuable knowledge, and who gets to produce it. Drawing on thinkers like Mariana Mazzucato and Adam Tooze, his work explores higher education and philanthropy as long-term investments in ideas — and asks what it would mean to treat knowledge itself as a public good worth protecting.
Sociology
Trained in the Brazilian critical sociology tradition and later at The New School, Frederico’s doctoral research examined international student mobility and Brazil’s place in the global knowledge economy. His earlier research with Brazil’s quilombo communities looked at how social movements build political power from the ground up — a thread that still runs through everything he studies.
Learning
Having taught at the University of São Paulo, the University of Sussex, and The New School, and having watched education systems up close from Kakuma refugee camp to Ivy League admissions committees, Frederico is drawn to how people actually learn — experientially, relationally, and often outside the classrooms built for them.
Technology and Society
Frederico’s recent writing, including “Higher Education has a Labor Problem” (2025), examines how universities are being reshaped by technology and labor pressures alike — asking whether institutions built for an earlier era can adapt to AI, platform economics, and new models of work without losing sight of their public mission.
Democracy and Civic Engagement
Frederico’s political formation began as a teenage delegate in Porto Alegre’s Participatory Budgeting process, one of the most studied experiments in deliberative democracy. That grounding shaped a career-long commitment to civic participation, academic freedom, and the inclusion of marginalized voices — commitments he’s carried from grassroots organizing in Brazil to global philanthropy today.
