First Meeting of Minister Montserrat with Directors of CERCA Centres

  • Minister Montserrat: “We must work systematically so that research centres continue to address the major scientific challenges.”

  • The Minister advocates for networked collaboration to tackle challenges such as the implementation of AI in research and the enhancement of innovation and knowledge transfer.

This morning, the Minister for Research and Universities, Núria Montserrat, met with the directors of CERCA research centres with the aim of “gaining first-hand knowledge of the research being carried out at each centre and, at the same time, identifying opportunities for shared, networked research in order to address the major challenges facing the scientific landscape, such as the potential of artificial intelligence and the digitalisation of research data.

In her address, the head of Research and Universities emphasised the importance of centres “fostering synergies to continue advancing towards the shared goal of making a positive impact on society and the planet as a whole, working systematically, consolidating and training talent, while also improving our management teams.” The Minister also highlighted the need for Catalan centres to participate in European research infrastructures by engaging in their calls, and to firmly commit to innovation and knowledge transfer.

Laia Pellejà, director of CERCA, also addressed the directors, stressing that her institution “is being strengthened to provide you with support in new areas such as open science and the implementation of plans and strategies derived from the Catalan Science Law.

Following the Minister’s welcome remarks, the directors of the CERCA centres took the floor to present the main lines of work and future priority projects of their respective centres.

In addition to Minister Montserrat, the meeting was attended by the Director General for Research, Joan Gómez Pallarès, and the Director General for Knowledge Transfer and Society, Laia Arnal i Aras.

Carme Cascante, new Director of the Centre de Recerca Matemàtica

  • Her leadership comes as CRM celebrates 40 years as Spain’s oldest and internationally renowned mathematics research centre.

The Governing Board of the Centre de Recerca Matemàtica (CRM) approved the appointment of Professor Carme Cascante Canut as the new director of the centre in its meeting on July 2. Cascante, a professor at the Department of Mathematics at the University of Barcelona (UB), succeeds Lluís Alsedà i Soler in this position.

Professor Cascante brings an extensive academic and research career to her new leadership role at CRM. She has been a professor at UB since 1989, where, in addition to her teaching and research activities, she served as Dean of the Faculty of Mathematics and Director of the Barcelona Graduate School of Mathematics (BGSMath). She earned her PhD at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) under the supervision of Professor Joaquim Bruna, a former director of the CRM himself. Her primary research areas focus on complex analysis in one and several variables, particularly, the study of Carleson measures, pointwise multipliers, Hankel and Toeplitz operators on spaces of holomorphic functions in the unit ball. I am also interested in bilinear forms on Sobolev spaces.

Her appointment marks a pivotal moment of transition and renewal for CRM, as she is the first director from one of the recently affiliated universities. This shift highlights the centre’s dedication to fully integrating the University of Barcelona (UB) and the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) into both its research framework and governance.