On December 31, the National Agency for Research and Development (ANID) announced the results of its Fondecyt Initiation 2025 call, which funds scientific and technological projects submitted by early-stage independent researchers as they kick-start their careers in academia. These grants include a $30,000,000 (CLP) annual budget for up to 3 years and require the support of Chilean higher education institutions or research centers. In this call, the following professors from our School will receive funding:
Natalia Jiménez
Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Bioprocesses, and the Institute of Biological and Medical Engineering, with the project “From metagenomes to metabolic fluxes: A systems biology framework for characterizing environmental shifts in the Macrocystis pyrifera’s holobiont.”
Alejandro Maass
Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering, with the project “Resource-aware strategies for stochastic string stability of wireless vehicle platoons.”
Fernanda Ramírez
Assistant Professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, with the project “The Mechanisms Behind the STEM Gender Gap in Educational Trajectories.”
Tito Arévalo
Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and the Department of Mechanical and Metallurgical Engineering, with the project “Fusing Active and Passive Sensor Data for Robust Multispectral Reflectance Estimation in Agriculture and Forested Areas.”
Claudio Araya
Research Associate in the Department of Chemical and Bioprocess Engineering, with the project “Low-temperature CO2 methanation through mixed-oxides-based catalysts, and its in-operando study.”
The funding provided by ANID for early-career professors in higher education institutions is crucial to fostering research, networking, and the early impact of new academic staff at the UC School of Engineering. We congratulate the successful applicants selected in this call.
