A few days ago, Julio Careaga, mathematical civil engineer of Universidad de Concepción received very good news as he was one of the winner (among more than 30 applicants) of a competition to provide two places for doctoral students of the Center for Mathematical Sciences of the Faculty of Engineering of Lund University in Sweden. This implies that he will be part of the academic staff of this prestigious European institute, to completely dedicate himself to frontier scientific research activities, specifically in Modeling and Applied Mathematics in the Division of Numerical Analysis, headed by the academic Frank Wikström.

Careaga -who previously applied twice to the Becas Chile program of the Ministry of Education, without being selected despite the fact that at his short age he has publications in prestigious specialized journals, various presentations at national and international congresses and a scientific work with international collaboration- explains that his stay in Sweden will begin during September 2017 and that his research activity will continue the line that he has been developing with Professor Stefan Diehl from the University of Lund and the researcher and Subdirector of the Center for Research In Mathematical Engineering, CI²MA-UdeC, Raimund Bürger, who was his undergraduate thesis director. Careaga says that with both scientists he has already co-produced “four articles, three of which are published or accepted for publication and one submitted. In addition, with Professor Diehl we are working on other topics, which surely was very well evaluated by the committee that selected me for this job”, he states about the two research stays that he held at U. Lund in 2016. Careaga will perform another stay in Lund, joint with a visit to University of Oxford, England, to conduct research with Dr. Ricardo Ruiz-Baier, before formally beginning his doctoral studies.

The Center in which Careaga will work at the last quarter of this year is one of the entities prioritized to institutional collaboration by the UdeC Doctorate Program in Applied Sciences with a major in Mathematical Engineering, because it is characterized by counting with an outstanding academic staff in terms of its research activity, generating a propitious environment to postgraduate education. The areas of expertise in which this scientific entity has achieved notoriety are very varied and are organized into research groups such as Dynamic Systems, Numerical Analysis, Partial Differential Equations, Stochastic Modeling and Financial Mathematics, among many others. The doctoral students of this Center are in position to develop papers for their publication in leading journals of the discipline and to acquire relevant teaching experience, since one of its regular functions is to teach classes. Thereby, Careaga explains that his contractual relationship with Lund “involves the research work, in addition to some hours of teaching and achieve the credits required by the doctorate program, and collaborating in certain required assistance tasks. It is also expected some papers to be produced”, he says.

Careaga has carried out its research work in CI²MA which, as its very successful research stays in Sweden, has been funded by Anillo projects ACT 1118 (ANANUM), Fondecyt 1130154 and 1170473, by CMM-Basal project, and by the University of Lund itself. On the other hand, Professors Bürger and Diehl, together with UdeC doctoral students Camilo Mejías and Julio Careaga, as well as other collaborators, hope to be able to contribute to the recently created ACCESS, an academic cooperation platform between Chile and Sweden.