Margarita Paneque Sosa has been appointed as institutional representative/delegate of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) in Andalusia by the President of this institution, Rosa Menéndez, thus replacing Miguel Ferrer, who was in office since February 2012.
New challenges
Andalusia, with 23 centres, 11 of these run jointly by various Andalusian universities and government departments of the Local Government of Andalusia is, after Madrid, the autonomous region with the largest number of CSIC centers. In them, they develop their activity around 1,400 people, 45 percent of which are scientists or technologists.
The Delegation of the CSIC in Andalusia has, among its functions, the coordination and provision of services to the research institutes. In this sense, Margarita Paneque notes that among its main objectives is “to enhance institutional relations with agents in the region, such as the Andalusian Regional Government and Universities, to underscore the importance of R&D and the need to work together”. In this line, the new institutional representative places the Delegation as an indispensable mechanism to provide services to the research institutes “for coordination and support” in their research activity. And, even further, Prof. Paneque gives great prominence to the dissemination and communication of Science. “We must take advantage of an instrument such as the Casa de la Ciencia de Sevilla, CSIC’s dissemination center, to make visible the R&D that is carried out in our centers and that researchers themselves can find in it a vehicle to disseminate their work”.