The assessment of the cooperation agreement advances and the planning of new joint activities – these were some of the topics the UFRO delegation worked on with KU Leuven University in Belgium, which is one of the most prestigious and traditional ones in Europe.

The Belgium KU Leuven University is among the best 50 universities in the world according to the prestigious Times Higher Education Ranking (THE) 2018 and it has become a strategic ally for the Universidad de La Frontera within the cooperation that already lasts ten years.

The UFRO is the only university in Latin-America which the KU Leuven University has an extended Cooperation Agreement and a Double Degree Agreement for Doctoral Programs with, that has been signed in 2017 and broadened the previous agreement signed in 2009 by the UFRO Faculty of Agricultural and Forestry Science and the Faculty of Bioscience Engineering (FBSE) of KU Leuven.

These are strings that maintain the confidence and mutual collaboration the universities sustained over time. This is what its promoters at the institutional level, the academics Rodolfo Pihán and Dr. Adison Altamirano of the Faculty of Agricultural and Forestry Science, who have been participating in a series of activities in Belgium, said. Their objective is to assess the advances of this Cooperation Agreement together with KU Leuven and to define new specific activities.

“This prestigious European university is a strategic ally for the UFRO. It is one of the best in the world and with which we have been developing successful collaborative work over time, with concrete activities because of which for example a productive student and academic exchange has been possible. Each semester, Belgium researchers visit us and we receive postgraduate students who come to our country and university to live an international academic experience”, Rodolfo Pihán commented.

He added that “since last year, we have been able to amplify this alliance that benefits the whole university, apart from the Double Degree Agreement for doctoral programs in Science, Engineering and Technology, which is very relevant in the work of internationalization of our university´s postgraduate programs.”

“But the idea is to advance within these new activities that maintain the Agreements active and productive”, Dr. Adison Altamirano said. “During the visit, we have been working on the assessment of the cooperation advances and on some specific actions we are developing. One of them is the Double Degree Agreement and we have been talking about the connections with professors and co-tutors at KU Leuven and the process the doctoral students have to go through to access this double degree.”

Against this background, they had a series of meetings with authorities of the FBSE, such as the director of International Relations, Matt Tips, and the UFRO agreements coordinator, Dr. Pol Coppin, apart from from visits in order to get to know the scientific work at the Centre for Surface Chemistry and Catalysis and the Bioversity International Musa GermplasmTransit Centre, among other activities.

Another topic the academics worked on was the advance on a joint project of creating an international scientific center that is focused on global issues from a multidisciplinary perspective that reaches from social science to engineering science.

“We achieved the growth of this cooperation and its projection over time. Both universities are interested in that. Each year, we have Belgium students in our classrooms, we do joint research, and we are creating new activities in order to maintain this alliance alive”, Rodolfo Pihán pointed out.

At the moment, two UFRO Master´s students in Natural Resource Management, Germán Catalán and Paola Arroyo, are at KU Leuven for an academic exchange and with an Erasmus scholarship each. And in July, a delegation of the European institution is going to come to Temuco, led by the dean of the Faculty of Bioscience Engineering, Nadine Buys, accompanied by Christophe Courtin, Pol Coppin and Bart Muys.