From September and December last year, the Center for Research in Mathematical Engineering, CI²Ma, of the Universidad de Concepción (UdeC), hosted the visit of Paulo Navia, a student of the Ph.D. program in Mathematical Sciences at the Universidad del Cauca (Unicauca), Colombia.

It was in the context of the collaboration between the CI²Ma researcher, Dr. Manuel Solano Palma, and Paulo's thesis director, Dr. Christian Gómez, who had already visit to Concepción in 2022. "We were interested in me getting to know and learn about the Hybridizable Discontinuous Galerkin (HDG) method for approximating the solution of partial differential equations (PDEs)," explains Paulo about his motivation for this stay for which he received funding from his own doctoral scholarship, complemented by contributions from Unicauca.   

"Dr. Solano", Paulo details, "proposed to me to analyze the HDG method applied to the Boussinesq problem, and we obtained theoretical results that indicate optimal order of convergence of the approximation to the solution of this problem". 

In this regard, Prof. Solano explained that "we are having international mobility from Colombia to our research group here at UdeC since at least 20 years ago. In fact, many Colombian students have graduated from our Ph.D. program in Applied Sciences with major in Mathematical Engineering, and other students, a s well as many Colombian researchers, have visited us for short term. In my case, this is the third time that I host a visiting Colombian student”.  

“Paulo did an excellent job. He was very hardworking to learn as much as he could. We will keep in touch to continue our collaboration and I hope Paulo can visit us again”, CI²Ma researcher emphasized.  

In this regard, the director of CI²Ma, Dr. Rodolfo Araya Durán emphasized that "it is very gratifying to see that our academics are internationally recognized, which is reflected in the visits of both specialists and students from foreign universities to our center. Given the academic quality of Dr. Solano, we are sure that this collaboration will be extended over time". 

"I would like to invite other students to consider doing their internships at CI²Ma, since, first, they have top level researchers; second, they have all the material resources to achieve the proposed objectives, in addition to the familiar atmosphere that I felt" stated Paulo and added that "I would like to thank Dr. Manuel Solano, whom I admire for his human and professional qualities, for his help, disposition and hospitality during my stay in Chile and to Dr. Rommel Bustinza for his hospitality and for allowing me to know very beautiful places of the Biobío region; to my colleagues and administrative personnel who have made my experiences very pleasant".