The Center for Research in Mathematical Engineering, CI²MA, from Universidad de Concepción, received from the Associative Research Program (PIA) of Conicyt, the confirmation of the renewal of the necessary resources for its operation for a new period of three years, beginning next June. All this in the context of the award of the extension of the Basal Project of the Center for Mathematical Modeling (CMM) of the Universidad de Chile, from where a large part of the funds that finance the scientific work carried out by the researchers of the CI²MA come from. The above, under an inter-institutional collaboration agreement that, among other advances, has favored the participation of academicians from Universidad del Bío-Bío and the Universidad Católica de la Santísima Concepción in the various research projects promoted by this UdeC  center, with relevant results in terms of scientific productivity and co-direction of undergraduate and postgraduate theses, among other indicators.

“The renewal of the joint basal project with the CMM of the U. of Chile for three more years, thus completing a total period of 13 years, is due to the achievements we have been able to accomplish in this time, which has been endorsed by reports of international referees of undeniable prestige”, Gabriel Gatica, Director of the CI²MA, explains, adding that this award “also constitutes an explicit, objective recognition, and lacking any political or other similar manipulation, to the extraordinary scientific progress achieved by our Center in the last decade, mainly in regard to the activities and respective achievements of the group of researchers in Numerical Analysis of Partial Differential Equations”.

Raimund Bürger, Sub-Director of CI²MA and Director of the PhD Program in Applied Sciences with a minor in Mathematical Engineering, stressed that “the renewal of funding will undoubtedly not only strengthen the scientific work of the researchers involved, in all the areas, but also will greatly support the CI²MA consolidation as a destination for scientific training, at the doctoral and postdoctoral level, in Chile and internationally”. This renewal of funding reaffirms and consolidates the work that nearly two decades ago CI²MA researchers and their CMM colleagues have been carrying out, initially in the context of the National Fund for Advanced Research in Priority Areas, FONDAP, and subsequently, under the ‘umbrella’ of the PIA program Project Baseline of Conicyt. In this regard, Raimund Bürger also highlighted that, in his role as a program director, he has been responsible for “carrying out divulgation missions in which my foreign colleagues, explicitly, recognized the leadership of the CI²MA in applied research field, wishing that their own young researchers were linked to our Center. This recognition, undoubtedly, would not have been possible without the CMM-Basal Project contributiont”, the researcher explained.