ACCESS is a platform that seeks to promote and facilitate the academic collaboration between Chile and Sweden and will allow UFRO to establish important international partnerships for advanced research.

After diverse preparations, Universidad de La Frontera (UFRO) officially confirmed its entry into the prestigious platform Academic Collaboration Chile Sweden (ACCESS), a network for international collaboration between Chile and Sweden.

ACCESS is a platform that seeks to promote and facilitate the academic collaboration between Chile and Sweden and will allow UFRO to establish important international partnerships for advanced research.

According to Dr. Rodrigo Navia Diez, the Vice-rector for Research and Graduate Studies, UFROs participation in this platform is a milestone and an opportunity for internationalisation and international mobility. “The opportunity to be part of ACCESS is a very important milestone, because this collaborative platform, consisting of eight Swedish universities and eight Chilean universities, allows a series of activities in the fields of student and academic mobility, research and graduate studies, which promote the internationalisation of our university. We hope that this platform will somehow strengthen our research and our work in the fields of graduate studies and internationalisation,” he commented.

The incorporation of UFRO into the platform ACCESS is the result of a cooperative work between the Vice-rectorate for Research and Graduate Studies, the International Affairs Office, and Dr. Iván Velásquez, an academic of UFROs Faculty of Engineering and Science, who initiated the conversations during a recent trip in order to materialise this impulse of development and collaboration.

“The idea is to expand and exchange knowledge between the universities’ researchers and to promote student exchange, visits, internships and graduate studies, as well as to develop joint doctoral courses,” explained Dr. Velazquez.

The ACCESS platform started in 2016, with the Swedish universities Lund University and Uppsala University and the Chilean universities Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and Universidad de Chile, with the aim of facilitating and deepening the academic relations between Chile and Sweden. At that time, the founding members of the platform collectively agreed on the framework and decided to create research seminars in Chile and Sweden.