The team comprises the following members:

• Ricardo Semler, president of SEMCO (a Brazilian machine manufacturer and service provider) renowned internationally as the creator of the most uncommon workplace worldwide. His managerial philosophy of empowering employees and of seeing the corporate structure from a new viewpoint poses major challenges to the corporate pyramid deeply rooted in people’s minds and in the current entrepreneurial practices. These challenges actually extend into the educational system, which has been unable to properly prepare people to perform their job functions and also in life and society, in a competent, autonomous and responsible manner. His work, as described in books he wrote such as Virando a Própria Mesa, Maverick (translated into 23 languages), The Seven-day Weekend, and Você Está Louco? paved the way for him to be invited to be a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University so that he could teach leadership at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Through Fundação SEMCO and Lumiar Institute, he has been developing a number of social projects, such as DNA Brasil, the Habitat dos Mellos and, naturally, Lumiar Schools, of which he is the creator and a mentor.
  
  
• Estela Souza, Director of Lumiar Institute, is based in England. She graduated in Physics from the University of São Paulo (USP) and in Modern Languages from the University of Vale do Paraíba. She has also taken a specialization course in Information and Culture at the Communications and Arts School of USP and holds an MPhil in Business Administration in the area of Learning, from the School of Economics and Business of USP. Estela has devoted herself to actively investigating the learning which takes place along a person’s life and into the process of competencies development. In the past fifteen years, she has been studying this phenomenon in different contexts: from child learning, inside and outside of school, up to the adult learning in the corporate environment. From 2004 and 2005 she headed the project of one of Lumiar pilots Schools. Estela is currently working on the establishment of international partnerships, taking an active role in the formation of a collaborative research team based in Brussels. This initiative headed by Lumiar Institute jointly with Microsoft aims at making Lumiar’s educational system available to all those interested in it.