On the final day of this year’s General Conference, an agreement was signed between Aldo Malavasi, Head of the IAEA’s Department of Nuclear Sciences and Applications, and Lydia Gutierrez, Director of a new Collaborating Centre in Mexico — the National Institute of Nuclear Research (ININ).
Throughout their 37 years in operation, the team at ININ has made continuous efforts to upgrade their facilities and improve safety. Their designation as a Collaborating Centre is partly the result of their persistence in these efforts at improvement. The signing of this agreement marks the beginning of a four-year period of close cooperation with the IAEA.
ININ also brings several decades of experience delivering practical, hands-on training to specialists — e.g. in Cuba and Nigeria — on the use and upgradation of Cobalt-60 irradiation facilities. The agreement with the IAEA will spur additional training activities in areas like laboratory quality control and the elaboration of didactic materials that can be disseminated to other stakeholders in the region. ININ will help work toward programme goals set by the IAEA, extending the reach of those efforts in their region.
This is a wonderful example of what Collaborating Centres are for: we build strong connections between scientific institutions around the world, and use those connections to improve the practice and safety of nuclear applications in those regions.
