On December 14 a meeting was held with the President of the National Research Agency (Agence national de la Recherche, ANR) by Michael Matlosz, who noted the mutual interest in the development of multi-format cooperation and outlined future practical steps for the development of this cooperation. "ANR is a very similar to the RSF organization, it is also relatively young. We fully coincide in the level of grant support, the number and scientific quality of the supported projects, the challenges which we work with," - said Simachev. - "I hope that the interim budget difficulties in ANR will not hurt to realize the full potential of our cooperation."
The RSF delegation held on December 15 negotiations with the Director for international relations of the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS)
Patrick Nedellec. With regard to intensive scientific cooperation between Russian and French scientists, the parties agreed to develop mutually interesting forms of cooperation. In particular, it was agreed to discuss at the expert level the participation of CNRS in the further development and integration into the European research area wiith regards to the laboratories funded by RSF. "The Russian Science Foundation support is provided on a competitive basis in accordance with the highest international standards to the scientific research of world-class in Russia. By the number of joint publications, France is the third partner for Russia after the United States and Germany. We are certainly ready to support the best joint Russian-French projects on a wide range of research areas from medicine to social sciences and humanities" - said the RSF Deputy Director.
"Based on the number of joint publications (without the social sciences and humanities), Russia is the 13th partner of France and 11th partner of ANR. If we exclude European countries, Russia is the third partner after the US and China," continued Philip Nedellec - "By the research area the joint work is distrubuted as follows: 61% physics, 21% - Earth science and 14% chemistry, 9% in mathematics and engineering sciences, 7% medicine, 6% fundamental biology. The cooperation with Russian partners is a strategic one for us."
