Program Info
The research activities on Chemistry at Federal University of Ceara (Universidade Federal do Ceará – UFC) started in 1954 at the School of Agronomy and the Faculty of Pharmacy. Later, in 1959, the Institute of Chemistry and Technology was created with the aim of concentrating teaching and research activities and bringing together professionals in this area. In 1976 and 1977, the Graduate Programs in Organic and Inorganic Chemistry were established, respectively. Following the national trend induced by the Coordenação de aperfeiçoamento de pessoal de nível superior (CAPES), the Graduate Programs in Organic and Inorganic Chemistry were merged in 2008 resulting in a single Graduate Program named Graduate Program in Chemistry (PGQUIM) with the major objective of disseminating science and training qualified human resources. Since then, three other areas of study were included resulting in the following five concentration areas: Physical-Chemistry, Analytical, Inorganic, Organic, and Chemistry. The latter area involves Polymer, Materials, and Nanotechnology. Since 2008, the Program’s faculty, composed of 55 professors in average, have contributed with the supervision of 359 and 189 master and doctoral projects, respectively. Nowadays, there are 58 professors, 55% being researchers of CNPq, and 199 students (132 as PhD and 67 as master students). The ranking of Graduate Programs in Brazil, defined and supervised by CAPES, is composed by a tier list from 1 to 7, with those in tier from 6 to 7 being top-ranked and listed as “excellence programs”. The PGQUIM Program started in 2008 in tier 5 then raised to tier 6 after the evaluation cycle 2013-2016. This result placed PGQUIM in the select top-tier group of the 16 excellence programs in Chemistry in Brazil. Among them, only two others are located in the Northeast region: one at UFC (PGQUIM) and another at the Federal University of Pernambuco. Despite a huge decrease in the number of scholarships (lesser 52 scholarships than in 2019) as a result of the new granting models of the funding agencies CAPES and CNPq, the students and the Program’s faculty have been working hard not only to consolidate the tier 6 but also to reach productive levels compatible with tier 7.
