An intense week of work in Chile was spent by Dr. Eric Le Fur, Professor at the Université de Rennes (France), a member of the prestigious “École”, the institution’s Graduate School of Chemistry, with Cedenna-Usach researcher Dr. Diego Venegas, with whom he has been carrying out joint research for years as part of the scientific efforts of both countries.
The project is part of a line of Franco-Chilean scientific cooperation in the field of inorganic chemistry that, since 1991, quickly grew through numerous bilateral research programs. It was renewed in 2022 as the current international research project “Cooperation in Inorganic Chemistry” (IRP CoopIC, 2022-2026), an ongoing scientific collaboration involving some twenty permanent members on each side.
“This is not a collaboration between countries at different levels of development. In this field, Chile and France are at the same research level thanks to the joint knowledge obtained from this interaction,” stresses Le Fur.
Their current work is on solid-state chemistry and photodegradation; however, they are also resuming an earlier line of research on vanadates, topics on which both have published numerous texts.
“The IRP is important because it allows us to travel to Chile and its researchers to visit us in France to work together. For the French National Center for Scientific Research it is very important that several countries collaborate, and this allows us to apply for joint projects to develop lines of work like this one. As I said, it is no longer about transferring knowledge, but about scientific development between peers who have many possibilities to keep evolving and combining different knowledge that makes an even greater contribution to the same line of research”.
Thanks to the IRP, the University of Rennes in France and the Universidad de Santiago, Universidad de Chile, Universidad de Talca, PUCV, UNAB and UBO currently work together.
