2022: 30 years of France-Chile scientific cooperation

The members of the scientific committee, researchers participating in the programme and a large Chilean delegation were received at the Embassy of Chile in Paris, with the participation of the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Higher Education and Research and Unesco, to highlight the solidity and vibrancy of academic and scientific cooperation between France and Chile and cooperation prospects in the area of vocational training.

In the last 30 years, the ECOS-ANID programme has supported almost 600 Franco-Chilean research projects in the fields of health, environmental sustainability and humanities, as well as many scientific publications, with a particular focus on training young researchers. It has also fostered the creation of bilateral research centres (Mathematical Modelling Centre, for example) which are a successful and balanced means of pooling the two countries’ scientific expertise.

Vidéo en espagnol avec option de traduction automatique en français :
Christian Gonzalez, président de la Société chilienne des neurosciences et professeur de neurologie cellulaire et moléculaire à l’Université du Chili, parle de la force du programme ECOS ANID et de deux projets qu’il a développés grâce à cette coopération.

Long-standing, pioneering cooperation

Research plays a key role in informing political decisions. For many years, France has been stepping up the linkages between its scientific and foreign policies, developing open, dynamic scientific diplomacy in order to address common challenges such as climate change and the emergence of new diseases.

Franco-Chilean scientific cooperation illustrates this ambition: the CNRS has made the Mathematical Modelling Centre (CMM), created in 1990, its first “International Joint Unit” (UMI) outside France in any discipline. The CNRS has developed more international laboratories in Chile than in any other Latin American country (astronomy, mathematics, marine biology, etc.). INRIA Chile has been in Santiago for 10 years and is the first centre abroad of France’s National Institute for Computer Science and Applied Mathematics (INRIA). France is Chile’s 4th-ranked scientific partner (1,000 co-publications), thanks in part to research programmes and fundamental mobility programmes at bilateral level (ECOS Chile, 1992) and regional level (STIC AmSud, Climat AmSud and MATH AmSud). There are some 16 Franco-Chilean research laboratories.