They hold an informative talk to spread the CONICYT FONDEF contest

fondef contest

Professionals from the Fund for the Promotion of Scientific and Technological Development (FONDEF) are spread throughout the country to publicize the scope of the First FONDEF IDeA contest, aimed at scientists and researchers and whose call will open soon.

Managers, academics and researchers met in the Alejandro Cobarruvias room at the ULS, in order to learn about the scope of the call for funding applied research projects.

During the talk, the project executive and coordinator of the FONDEF health area, Alfredo Liu, explained in detail the characteristics of the contest, the objectives of the first and second stages, and fundamentally the application requirements, amounts to which they can access those who present an initiative, subsidy system, execution deadlines and financeable item, among others.

''In this stage of dissemination, our main objective is the researchers, we have resources to allocate to good projects and we hope to receive many proposals from all regions, which achieve excellent results. This also positions us as an instrument for allocating public resources for applied research in our country,'' Liu said.

It should be noted that the projects can reach an amount of 150 million pesos for execution in a period of 24 months. These could continue in a second stage, to continue scaling in the development of the technology that is expected to be obtained.

Those attending the meeting were also able to learn more about the details of the process, learning about specific aspects of the application platform through brief training.

This competitive fund requires active participation from universities, supporting initiatives and focusing their efforts on solving local problems, which is why the vice-rector of the University of La Serena, Dr. Jorge Catalán, valued the opportunity that researchers have. to know and access these resources. ''Hopefully this will be a great incentive for academics to participate in FONDEF projects, since they link scientific development with technological development and that naturally has an important impact on the community. Since we are interested, due to our declared social responsibility, in having the university contribute to the regional and national community, this is a very good way to have projects that can be sustainable and to be able to carry out initiatives that are of social benefit in the most as wide as possible,'' he said.

According to what was stated by the FONDEF executive, those who benefit receive advice and support during the execution period of the ideas, thanks to the participation of an area committee that works hand in hand with each initiative. ''We want research and infrastructure capabilities to be developed in the regions,'' Liu said.

The activity, attended by academics from various areas of knowledge, was organized by the Research Directorate of the University of La Serena and as Dr. Eduardo Notte points out, ''there are stages that the University has to go through, we have been doing a lot of development in basic research and now it is important that people apply for application projects. This is an activity that is done to encourage and inform that there are participation instances where application projects are financed with the purpose of the work teams presenting their projects, verifying how applicable they are and if they require external resources to carry them out. .