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Scientific and academic cooperation with the United States: the University of Florida and INRAE sign their first framework agreement
PRESS RELEASE – Philippe Mauguin, Chair & CEO of INRAE, and Lisa C. Stroud, Director of the Division of Sponsored Programs at the University of Florida (UF), recently signed (remotely) a framework agreement for cooperation between the two institutions. This agreement aims to bolster cooperation between INRAE and the Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (IFAS) at the University of Florida. In recognition of the importance of mutual collaboration and the societal contributions made by higher education and research institutes, this framework agreement seeks to promote academic and research exchanges between the two signatory institutions on topics of common interest.
Published on 20 October 2020
Ranked third among INRAE’s American partners for 2016–18, the University of Florida in Gainesville has a student body of 55,000, and one-third of its students are international. The agriculture/food/natural resources course programmes lead enrolment, second only to the university’s health programmes. UF’s internal IFAS institute tackles issues on agriculture, food and the environment, which are also INRAE’s priorities. UF published around 1,460 peer-reviewed articles in 2017 on these topics. Among American universities, UF has topped the rankings in terms of agricultural research and development spending, coming in first or second for the past 20 years.
INRAE and IFAS researchers have already had many fruitful collaborations, notably on modelling the impacts of climate change on crops. This new agreement, initiated at the end of a visit in January 2020 by Jean-Francois Soussana, INRAE’s Vice-President of International Policy, for the University of Florida’s 75th anniversary, could give rise to major future projects in this field as well as in agroecology, animal husbandry, animal health and nutrition.