On 18 June 2015, during the 176th Session of the CERN Council, Romania was unanimously accepted as a full member of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research – CERN. This event comes as a natural consequence of the candidate status that Romania had since December 2008, and as a recognition of the contributions and performances of the Romanian researchers involved in the scientific experiments conducted at CERN. The next step in Romania’s accession to CERN is the ratification of the Resolution in Parliament.
The Romanian delegation in Geneva was led by Ms. Prof. Dr. Ing. Ecaterina Andronescu, Chairman of the Senate of the Politehnica University of Bucharest and President of the Committee on Education, Science, Youth and Sport of the Romanian Senate and Prof. Dr. Ing. Tudor Prisecaru, Secretary of State for Research in the Ministry of Education and Scientific Research and President of the National Authority for Scientific Research and Innovation. The meeting was also attended by Ms. Maria Ciobanu, Ambassador and Head of the Permanent Mission of Romania to the UN – Geneva and Mr. Traian Filip, Deputy of the Permanent Representative, according to a press release of the Ministry of Education and Research.
Currently, more than 100 Romanian researchers are participating in the scientific experiments carried out at LHC (ALICE, ATLAS, LHCb etc.) and in the global GRID network. The first LHC experiment where the Institute of Space Science (ISS) has been involved from its proposal stage is MoEDAL. The ALICE experiment (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) is another important experiment where ISS researchers are involved. From May to November 2015 some ISS researchers at at CERN, where they are running monitoring shifts for data acquisition at ALICE, as part of their duties. You can stay up to date with news about their work here.
„The Institute of Space Science welcomes the CERN Council’s unanimous vote on the acceptance of Romania as a state with full rights. This demonstrates once again the quality of the contributions that Romanian researchers bring to experiments at CERN and also opens a new horizon of cooperation for them”, said the ISS Director, Dr. Sorin Ion Zgură.
About the Romania – CERN collaboration
Romania’s collaboration with CERN began in 1991 with the signature of the first Agreement on the Romanian research and industry involvement in programs of this organisation.
In December 2008, Romania was accepted as a candidate state at CERN and a year later a draft agreement with CERN on the accession of Romania as a full member was completed. The document, valid for five years, was signed in February 2010 in Geneva, and subsequently ratified by Law 203/2010.
As a result of participating in the experiments carried out at CERN, Romania has achieved not only access to the CERN research infrastructure but also the opportunity to develop its own research infrastructure. Therefore, the development of new types of detectors and calorimeters was possible, and also accesing European funds through the FP6 and FP7 programs, obtaining two invention patents awarded at the International Exhibition of Inventions in Geneva, and the design and operation of the preshower detector, the first entirely Romanian detector operated at CERN. Last but not least, the access to technology and/or last generation equipment, but also to special databases and information sources, facilitated the constant optimisation of the Romanian researchers’ knowledge, resources that can be exploited in the economic sector.