Sonia Guimarães
Professor at the Aeronautics Institute of Technology (ITA) and PhD in Physics from the University of Manchester, she is the first Black woman in Brazil to earn a PhD in Physics (1989). In 1993, she joined ITA as its first Black woman professor, at a time when the institute did not yet admit women as students. Born in São Paulo, she lives in São José dos Campos and continues to teach at ITA. In 2023, Bloomberg Línea named her one of the 100 Most Innovative People in Latin America. In 2025, Forbes recognized her as one of Brazil's Most Powerful Women.
The Future is Ancestral: In Age, In Memory, In Wisdom
Two forces traverse our time: population aging and the urgency to reconnect innovation with accumulated knowledge. If we live longer, we also carry more memory, and it is in this accumulation that a frequently underestimated power resides. The panel invites us to rethink the future not as a rupture with the past, but as expanded continuity, where experience, traditional knowledge, and life trajectories become strategic assets for society. Between longevity and ancestrality, the central question is: how to transform lived time into shared wisdom to guide the next cycles? To undertake, in this sense, is to recognize that experience is also technology.