The Ambassador of the Republic of Cuba, Ramón Ripoll Díaz and the Embassy Counselor for Scientific and Academic Affairs, Ms. María Franco Suárez visited the Leibniz Institute of Plant Biochemistry (IPB) in Halle on June 7, 2021.
The Managing Director of the institute, Professor Steffen Abel welcomed the guests and introduced the institute. Afterwards the project GLACIER (German-Latin American Center of Infection and Epidemiology Research and Training) was presented by Professor Ludger Wessjohann. The German-Latin American Center, selected by the DAAD and funded by the German Foreign Office with 2.8 million Euros for the next five years, is a joint project of the IPB together with the Institute of Medical Immunology of the University Hospital Halle and the Institute of Virology of the Charité Berlin. The project aims to pool capacities for research and treatment of emerging infectious diseases in Latin America. The partner institutions of the universities in Mexico City and Havana will each establish central research and training laboratories for this purpose.
Professor Daniel García Rivera from the University of Havana, former PhD student, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation fellow, and long-time cooperation partner of the IPB, emphasized the decades of intensive and successful cooperation of Cuban scientists with the IPB. Short presentations were then given on the current projects of Cuban scientists and students at IPB. Currently, the institute hosts four visiting scientists and three PhD students from Cuba. Professor Wessjohann gave the visitors a guided tour of the institute.
Afterwards, the participants met for lunch with discussions and exchange about research and science policy issues, but also about scientific life in Germany and Cuba. In addition, a meeting of the attending GLACIER PIs took place: Professor Barbara Seliger (Institute of Medical Immunology, University Hospital Halle), Professor Ludger Wessjohann (IPB), Professor Bert Hoffmann (Leibniz Institute of Global and Area Studies, GIGA Hamburg), Professor Michael Knipper (Justus Liebig University Giessen), and Professor Daniel García Rivera (University of Havana) together with Ms. Ulrike Dorfmüller (DAAD-Lektorat Havana) and Anna Rusznyak (IPB) discussed and planned the next steps after the project start.
