• UC Riverside and UABC signed an MOU.
• AlianzaMX presented a joint research initiative.

Last October, the chancellor of the University of California, Riverside (UC Riverside) and the president of the Autonomous University of Baja California (UABC) signed an agreement expressing the common intention of formally continuing the already existing collaboration between several University of California campuses and UABC.

To this end, academic and research personnel from both institutions held a meeting where they presented previous collaboration experiences, focusing on topics that, due to their relevance, require being addressed with binational perspectives, such as marine pollution and climate change; the study of materials in engineering and artificial intelligence; and studies on migrant labor and research on infectious diseases that affect populations with binational mobility, especially, tuberculosis.

AlianzaMX, a UC initiative, presented proposals to promote collaborative research and academic exchange between Mexico and California, such as a joint fund between UABC and UC Riverside to finance two new research projects over the next two years.

Dr. Kim A. Wilcox, chancellor of UC Riverside and promoter of AlianzaMX, said:

“Today, we have a chance to look back over decades of partnership between our universities, which really was a partnership between people, and a chance to mark a point where, in the future, others will look back at this relationship. … Now, we have a chance to think about how we will work together for decades to come. I am hopeful that when I am no longer sitting in the rector’s chair many years from now, there’ll be a presentation like this. They’ll have topics like marine sciences, which we’ve done together for a long time. Still, they’ll also see migration, public health, and artificial intelligence, which will probably have a different name by then, I’m guessing. And a host of other topics where the two institutions know about the topic, know about the people, know about the history, and know about the questions that we talk about so much today”.

For his part, the rector of the UABC, Dr. Luis Enrique Palafox Maestre, expressed his satisfaction at establishing collaboration with one of the largest academic communities in the world, such as UC Riverside. “I invite the entire UABC academic and research community to envision a collaboration with the University of California system,” he said. He added that he hopes the various existing projects prove successful so this collaboration lasts over time.

At the end of the meeting, Dr. Wilcox and Dr. Palafox Maestre signed the memorandum of understanding through which both institutions expressed the willingness to collaborate in research actions and agreed that scientific and technological cooperation between their institutions could increase competitiveness and social and economic development in Mexico and the United States.