BIOSANTEXC mid-term workshop was held on Tuesday 28 and Wednesday, 29 May 2024 at ENS de Lyon. The event organized by Cooperation and Partnerships division of the Office of International Affairs welcomed some forty participants from all the consortium’s member institutions, around half of whom came all the way from India for the occasion.
A fruitful partnership
Supported by a consortium comprising the four French Écoles Normales Supérieures (ENS), six Indian Institutes of Science, Education and Research (IISER) and the National Centre for Cell Science - an Indian research institute - BIOSANTEXC is one of four programs funded by the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs to create a Franco-Indian campus in life sciences for global health.Building on long-term collaborations between Indian and French institutes, BIOSANTEXC has helped to consolidate research partnerships through the funding of researcher mobility and master’s student internships in plant biology, molecular and cellular biology, functional genomics and infectiology. All four ENS de Lyon biology laboratories ( , LBMC , IGFL , CIRI ) are fully involved in at least one emerging collaboration, and presented the initial results of their work.
These strong links were underlined by François Roudier, Vice-President for Research at ENS de Lyon, in his opening speech for the workshop, noting that the consortium members "share common academic values and mindset."
BIOSANTEXC in numbers
- Student mobility (Masters): 17 interns hosted in France in 2023
- Research mobility: balanced exchange rates, with a total of 15 mobilities in 2023 (7 from India to France, 8 from France to India).
- 4 mobilities of technical and administrative staff financed for the workshop
- 2 doctoral research stays planned for autumn 2024
- a new Master’s level internship program at the start of the 2024 academic year: 6 months spent in each country, with Indian and French co-supervision.
Building the future Franco-Indian "One health" campus
Now that BIOSANTEXC and its three sister programs are halfway through their terms, the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs has decided to ensure their continuity by building a single Franco-Indian campus dedicated to life sciences for global health. On Wednesday afternoon, the workshop welcomed all the institutions involved, meeting for the first time to discuss this shared future.Opening this special event, ENS de Lyon President Emmanuel Trizac emphasized "the steadfast, unwavering support of both Indian and French authorities" in this project, which will have an impact throughout the Indo-Pacific region: involving not only the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs, but also the Indo-French Centre for the Promotion of Advanced Research (IFCPAR/CEFIPRA), the French Embassy in India and the Indian Embassy in France. These institutions also participated in the opening speeches, via remote video conferencing.
"The French-Indian campuses, an initiative which ENS de Lyon is proud to have been part of from the very beginning, serve as a model for us at all three levels, regional, national, and international. The interdependence with our partner institutions in the Université de Lyon, with the French Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Higher Education and Research, and indeed with our Indian counterparts in the academia and in government allow us to leverage forces that none of us could deploy alone."
Emmanuel Trizac, President of ENS de Lyon
Following the speech of the president of ENS de Lyon, Anne Giroir-Fendler - vice-president for international mobility at Lyon 1 University, Jim Walker - vice-president for international relations at Lyon 2 University, Santanu Bhattacharya - director of IISER Tirupati - and Sankar Das, vice-chancellor of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences - took turns at the podium to share their enthusiasm for this global campus, in which the place of the humanities and social sciences cannot be forgotten.
A campus "to be considered as a whole [...] which takes place in a very important Franco-Indian political context", in the words of the representative of the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs, whose speech, which underlined the Ministry’s positive appreciation of the steps already taken by the four programs, launched the discussions.
Joint doctoral programs, series of conferences, student testimonials, a website, structuring... these are just some of the ideas discussed, both in terms of teaching and research, and on an organizational level, as we look towards the future. While the concrete actions have yet to be defined, the determination to build this ambitious Franco-Indian campus is undoubtedly present.
For Franco-Indian programs involved:
- ENS de Lyon (coordinator): BIOSANTEXC, ENS-IISER network, National Centre for Cell Science
- Université Côte d’Azur (coordinator): program focusing on digital biosciences and innovation, with Indian partners ASHOKA University, IISc Bangalore and IIT Delhi.
- University of Reunion (coordinator): ILIADE (plant innovation and artificial intelligence for India and France), in partnership with the Universities of Lyon 1, Lyon 2 and Poitier and Indian partners Vellore Institute of Technology and National Center for Biological Sciences.
- Sorbonne University (coordinator): "Integrated Heath", in collaboration with Indian partners at IIT Delhi and AIIMS
In May 2023, the BIOSANTEXC program kick-off meeting was held. This event saw the launch of several collaborations, including one between Teva Vernoux, researcher at RDP (Plant Reproduction and Development) laboratory and Annapurna Devi Allu, professor at IISER Tirupati.
One year later, on May 30 and 31, 2024, the two collaborators organized their first workshop: "Improving plant robustness and productivity under changing environmental conditions." As part of the "One health" concept, the workshop was based on the premise that plants, despite representing 70-80% of terrestrial biomass, are often excluded from discussions on improving living conditions and health.
The meeting was held back-to-back with the BIOSANTEXC workshop, and brought together the plant biology communities at ENS de Lyon, ENS-PSL and the IISER, with the aim of sparking new collaborations to contribute to the development of a plant-based solution to the climate change crisis.
The meeting was concluded by the Director of IISER Tirupati, Santanu Bhattacharya, and the President of ENS de Lyon, Emmanuel Trizac, who took the opportunity to reiterate the strong ties that bind their two institutions and their willingness to combine their efforts to offer solutions to societies currently facing unprecedented global challenges.
