Renato Janine Riberio was Brazil’s Minister of Education from April to October 2015, in the Dilma Rousseff government. He is a professor of Ethics and Political Philosophy at the University of São Paulo and was a visiting professor at Columbia University in New York from 2003-2004. Today he is a visiting professor at the Federal University of São Paulo. He was also director of evaluation for Capes, an organ of the Ministry of Education (2004-2008). He was elected president of the Brazilian Society for the Advancement of Science in June 2021.

He has received the Jabuti Award for best essay (2001), as well as the following decorations: National Order of Scientific Merit (1998), Order of Rio Branco (2009), Order of Naval Merit (2015) and Grande Medalha da Inconfidência. He became Honorary Professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies at USP (2016) and Senior Researcher at CNPq (2017).

Among other works, he has published: Society against the social: the high cost of public life in Brazil (Jabuti Essay Prize, 2001), To the Fearless Reader – Hobbes Writing Against His Time (2nd edition, 2000), The Good Politics (Cia. das Letras, 2017), A Pátria Educadora em Colapso – Reflexões de um ex-ministro sobre a derrocada de Dilma Roussef e o futuro da educação no Brasil (Three Stars, 2018).

He also organised a series of 12 programmes on Ethics for TV Futura, later shown on Globo.