With the Académie des Sciences in 2013-2014

FOSteRinG inteRnAtiOnAL cOLLABORAtiOn

in asia

Southern Korea

The world leader for its R&D spending efforts, Southern Korea is a special partner

to the eyes of France. The academies of the two countries support such scientific

cooperation by tightening their ties, already enshrined in an agreement that was

settled in 1997.

On 8 April 2014 in Paris, the

academies have in particular

organized the

Computing Science

and BioInformatics

joint colloquium, which was introduced by the two Secrétaires

perpétuels of the Académie, Jean-François Bach and Catherine Bréchignac, and

the President of the Korean Academy of Science and Technology (KAST), Sung-

Hyun Park. Computer science is indeed a subject of growing interest for research

in biology: data management and analysis, modelling (growth, brain functioning),

imaging, etc. In particular, the objective is to promote this field of research, which

lies at the interface between several scientific disciplines. A second colloquium,

Healthy food

, shall be organized in Korea in 2015.

In November 2014, the Académie des Sciences was the guest of honour of the KAST 20

anniversary celebration events. On this

occasion, Catherine Bréchignac gave a lecture at a colloquium devoted to the creative economy.

China

France and the People’s Republic of China have settled in 2007 on a bilateral cooperation

agreement on Chinese traditional medicine. The steering committee (“Comité de pilotage”

in French, “Copil”) of this French-Chinese agreement meets every year and scientific

events involving members of the Académie des Sciences are organized on the margins of

these annual meetings:

•

on 22 April 2013, a seminar devoted to the approaches of Chinese traditional

medicine to metabolism and metagenomics was held at the Académie des

Sciences, under the supervision of the Secrétaire perpétuel Catherine Bréchignac

and Li Malin, the President of the Yunnan University of Traditional Chinese Medicine,

within the framework of the 5

Copil;

•

on 13 November 2014, Kunming, in China, was the venue for the scientific seminar that was held in the margins of the 6

Copil,

devoted to research themes shared by Chinese andWestern medicine, such as type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular diseases or obesity.

The

French-Chinese Foundation for Science and its Applications

(FFCSA) was founded by the French and Chinese academies of science

with support from universities, French graduate elite schools (Grandes écoles), regions and several French companies. Its mission is to

further scientific relations between France and the People’s Republic of China in all the fields of science and its applications:

•

in 2013-2014, the FFCSA continued supporting scientific cooperation, as it had been doing for more than 12 years, through the

organization of post-doctoral exchanges between the two countries, in the activities covered by the two divisions of the Académie

des Sciences. Chinese post-doctoral researchers, coming from the best Chinese universities or laboratories of the

Chinese Academy

of Sciences

(CAS), have been greeted in France at excellent laboratories that are spread throughout the country. These internships,

lasting 18 or 24 months, usually provide the opportunity to publish in international reviews and they often mark the beginning of a

sustainable cooperation between the post-doctoral researcher’s home laboratory and his/her host laboratory in France;

•

the FFCSA gathered the alumni who had come back to China, at Nanjing in 2013 and Harbin in 2014, for the traditional scientific

days that have been instituted for some years: these provide the opportunity to take stock of the research conducted by these

alumni in their laboratories or in relation with their French colleagues;

•

as every year, the FFCSA has awarded its annual Prize in memory of late Gilles Kahn, who co-chaired the Scientific Council of the

Foundation until 2006; the laureates were, in 2013, Xie Gaogang, from the Institute of Computer Technology of CAS in Beijing,

and in 2014 Huang Jinyan, from the Rui Jin Hospital, affiliated to Shanghai JiaoTong University.