H.E. Ambassador Luis Gallegos Chiriboga of the Permanent Mission of Ecuador in Geneva and Prof. Luciano Maiani, Director General of CERN.
Geneva, 15 June 1999. A new Scientific and Technological Co-operation Agreement was formally signed on June 15th 1999 in Geneva by H.E. Ambassador Luis Gallegos Chiriboga of the Permanent Mission of Ecuador in Geneva and Prof. Luciano Maiani, Director General of CERN1. Prof. Maiani said, "This agreement marks an important step forward in the development of our Laboratory's relationship with physicists in Latin America. We are delighted to formalize our contacts with the scientific community in Ecuador."
Physicists from Ecuador have already worked on CERN experiments, notably L3, and following this agreement will continue to contribute to the CERN scientific programme. Currently, physicists and engineers from various Centres and Universities from Ecuador are creating a joint platform to strengthen collaboration with CERN. The further development of these relationships will be to everyone's advantage. CERN will benefit from the participation of Ecuadorian Particle Physics community in its scientific programme and scientists and engineers from Ecuador will benefit from the unique training opportunities of working with the most advanced technologies on groundbreaking experiments.
Although essentially a European Laboratory, physicists from all around the world, including such countries as Canada, China, India, Israel, Japan and The United States of America work together on CERN experiments. The Co-operation agreement will permit scientists from Ecuador to share experience with colleagues from all over the world working at the frontier of technology and research. CERN will profit from the intellectual investment of the high quality scientists from Ecuador who will contribute to its future programmes.
Similar collaboration agreements have been signed with Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Mexico and Peru from Latin America and today's signature is another step forward in the development of basic science around the world.
1. CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, has its headquarters in Geneva. At present, its Member States are Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Israel, Japan, the Russian Federation, the United States of America, Turkey, the European Commission and Unesco have observer status.