The Cyprus Institute (CyI, see www.cyi.ac.cy) is a non-profit research and educational institution with a strong scientific and technological orientation, created in 2005. The Institute operates under the aegis of the Cyprus Research and Educational Foundation (CREF), which is governed by a Board of Trustees comprising leading personalities of the international academic, political and business worlds; it is currently chaired by Professor Edouard Brézin, former president of the French Academy of Sciences and Professor at the Ecole Normale Supérieure. The principal objectives of CREF are the advancement of knowledge and its humaneand benevolent application and the establishment of a new research and educational public-benefit organization that shall generally promote research and education in Cyprus and abroad and aim primarily at benefitting the public interest at large.
The CyI is being developed by establishing research centres, which address challenging problems that are important at both the regional and international levels. These centres are developed in partnership with leading institutions in their respective thematic areas: the Energy, Environment and Water Research Centre (EEWRC) with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Science and Technology in Archaeology Research Centre (STARC) with the Centre de recherche et de restauration des musées de France (C2RMF), headquartered in the Louvre, and the Computation-based Science and Technology Research Centre (CaSToRC) in partnership with the University of Illinois.
The EEWRC has an extensive research agenda addressing energy, environment and water issues and their interconnections based on scientific and technological analyses in four divisions: Energy and renewable energy sources, Environment and climate change, Water and renewable natural resources, Economy and policies. The EEWRC is intended as an important research resource for Cyprus, the eastern Mediterranean, the Middle East, and North Africa, and as a gateway between the EU and the Middle East and North Africa.
Thus the scope and objectives of the MED-SPRING project are particularly well suited for CREF-CyI, both in terms of the societal challenges that will be addressed, all of which have direct relation to the CyI research portfolio, and through the focus on Euro-Mediterranean dialogue and collaboration, which is in full agreement with the regional, Eastern-Mediterranean dimension that is fundamental to the CREF-CyI vision, leveraging the position of Cyprus as a gateway between Europe and the Middle-East.
