Barcelona City Council and BIST meet to discuss new and ongoing collaborations

by Oriol Roig

Representatives of the Barcelona City Council and of the BIST met on April 27 to discuss various BIST projects and the new initiative “Next Generation UE”.

A meeting between Barcelona’s Mayor Ada Colau and councillor Joan Subirats, representing the City Council, and representatives of the Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology (BIST), among whom was the director of ICN2, Pablo Ordejón, took place on the 27th of April 2021. During this session, various collaborations between BIST and the Council were revised and the project Next Generation UE was presented.

The collaborations discussed comprised the new research centre in the Antic Mercat del Peix, where BIST will build a 25,000 m2 building dedicated to precision medicine. Advancements in the new Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Mathematics (STEAM) Angeleta Ferrer Institute were also discussed. This Institute for teenagers will start its operation next September. Finally, they talked about the diverse outreach activities carried out by the BIST centres, which are more than 400 every year.

In the second part of the meeting, the representatives of the seven centres forming the BIST introduced to the Mayor the projects included in the Next Generation UE initiative. Two of them will see the involvement of the ICN2. In particular, Towards a European quantic Internet will be coordinated by ICFO with the ICN2 and IFAE’s participation, and Correlative in-situ installation for advanced energy materials, coordinated by the ALBA Synchrotron, will count on the collaboration of ICN2 researchers.