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Credit: CREATE
The CNRS will be setting up CNRS@CREATE, its first overseas subsidiary, in Singapore. Its objective will be to manage Franco-Singaporean research activities as part of the Singaporean ecosystem. An agreement to establish CNRS@CREATE was formalised on 13 July 2018 by Karin Ong, Deputy Chief of mission at Singaporean Embassy in France, and Antoine Petit, CEO of the CNRS, in the presence of French Minister of Higher education, Research and Innovation Frédérique Vidal and Singaporean Minister of Trade and Industry Chan Chun Sing.
2018 has been declared the France-Singapore Year of Innovation and the CNRS is strengthening its links with Singapore's research ecosystem by creating the subsidiary CNRS@CREATE. CREATE (Campus for Research Excellence And Technological Enterprise) is an international campus that forges partnerships between Singapore's universities/research institutions and leading overseas research institutions. Researchers at CREATE work on highly interdisciplinary projects to tackle challenges that are both relevant to Singapore and globally significant.
CNRS@CREATE will be a non-profit "Company Limited by Guarantee" under Singaporean law. It will be housed in the CREATE Tower where researchers from seven overseas partner universities (1) are based.
The CNRS is the first research organization to join the programme. CNRS@CREATE will open the way for the French ecosystem to participate in projects hosted in Singapore.
The first project proposed by the CNRS is titled SILVER (Singapore Innovative Living Environment). The project plans to build upon the work of the International Joint research unit IPAL (2), and will be jointly led by French and Singapore research leaders. SILVER seeks to address the challenges of an aging population faced by both Singapore and France, and will bring together expertise in health, human and social sciences, and information technologies from the CNRS, its French partner universities, the National University of Singapore (NUS) and the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD). This project would involve about one hundred people, split into teams directed in tandem by pairs of French and Singapore leaders.
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(1) Researchers from seven overseas partner universities - Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich), University of California Berkeley (UC Berkeley), Cambridge University, Technical University of Munich (TUM), Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJ), and Shanghai Jiao Tong University - are co-located in CREATE, where they work with researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS), Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore Management University (SMU) and Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) on several interdisciplinary research programmes. CREATE was set up by the National Research Foundation Singapore in 2007.
(2) Image and Pervasive Access Lab, which brings together the CNRS, National University of Singapore, Université Grenoble Alpes, Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), Institut Mines-Telecom and Université de la Sorbonne.