Mapping Scientific Diasporas – The Brazilian Case Study

This study leverages labor market data, name recognition, and analysis to map and understand scientific diasporas. A case study of the Brazilian scientific diaspora in the Greater Boston region illustrates the methodology developed by the Research Division of the City of Boston Planning Department in partnership with Claro Analytics and NamSor. The case study’s findings present Brazilians’ educational and professional characteristics in Boston’s scientific sectors. The case study’s methodology provides a scalable framework to analyze ethnic diasporas across the United States and globally.

The primary motivation for the study was to test a methodology designed to identify existing scientific diasporas from secondary data sets to provide a way for governments in sending and receiving countries to coordinate mutually leveraging diasporas’ knowledge and skills.

The Research Division is a division of the City of Boston’s Planning Department, which Mayor Wu established in 2024 to restore planning as a core function of city government. The Division compiles and analyzes current, historical, and comparative data on the City’s population and economy to produce quality research that informs policy.

Claro Analytics is a labor market company whose mission is to help organizations make more innovative, strategic talent decisions through actionable labor market data.

Claro currently has over 620 million profiles from across the globe parsed into different searchable categories such as skills, current employer, degree, location, etc.

NamSor is a Big data company that developed specialized data mining software that recognizes personal names’ linguistic or cultural origin in any alphabet or language to accurately classify personal names by gender, country of origin, or ethnicity.

NamSor uses a natural language processing (NLP) model, embedding a representation of a word as real-valued vectors that encode the world’s meaning

so that the words closer in the vector space are expected to be similar.

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BIBLIOGRAFIA:

Carneiro, Ana Maria; Gimenez, Ana Maria Nunes; Consoni, Flávia; Andretta, Victor Fidencio; Granja, Cintia Denise; Balbachevsky, Elizabeth (2019). Diáspora Brasileira de Ciência, Tecnologia e Inovação. Universidade de Campinas, São Paulo.

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Vega-Martinez, Jonathan; Pache de Athayde, Maria M.; Torres-Ardila, Fabián; Granberry, Phillip (2025). Tienen Alas, Pero No Las Pueden Usar: Stories of Immigrants in Search of Work Credentials. Gastón Institute Publications, University of Massachusetts Boston, Boston, MA.

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