Research Application sectors
However, the evident challenge for this assembly is to combine these skills to address the major challenges of the early 20th century.
● Environmental emergency and environmental technologies. There are two focus areas within this priority: climate and the environment, and energies with low greenhouse gas emissions (nuclear, solar, biofuels). Strongly linked research in these two areas results in a better understanding of the human impact on ecosystems and the design of products and services that will be marketed. It is important to emphasise that addressing these areas requires incorporating many disciplines present on the site: environmental sciences, engineering sciences when it comes time to develop solutions, and also humanities (economics, law, sociology) when it comes time to implement them.
● Health. Ongoing operations provide a unique opportunity to reorganise the foundation of basic research on the molecular and cellular basis of life, but also to create strong synergies with matter sciences and life sciences. This must also be an opportunity to make a real leap in changing the scale, from the molecular to individuals and communities within the ecosystem. Large restructuring operations have been carried out which have revealed the following research areas: functional and structural biology, neurosciences, therapeutic innovation: medications and human physiopathology.
● Security and food. The issues and challenges of global food security – to feed 9 billion people in 2050 – require that research efforts be increased internationally and skills and innovations be developed in a context of global change: population growth and food transitions, depletion and degradation of natural resources including energy, water, soils and biodiversity, and climate change. The "Food - Agriculture - Environment" project at the Paris-Saclay Campus aims to address these challenges by focusing on the design and methods for managing healthy, adaptive and sustainable food systems. Research is structured around the following three areas: production, networks and territories, integrative and engineering biology, and living biology, food, nutrition and health.
● Information, communication, and nanotechnologies. The activities in this priority area are already highly structured around the Digiteo thematic advanced research network, the network of major nanoscience technology centres (RTB) and, more recently, the Nano INNOV initiative in which Saclay is one of three national centres. Two areas managed at the campus are:
- Information and communication sciences and technologies
- Nanotechnologies
In all cases, only a multidisciplinary approach that incorporates the issues in their entirety can lead to tangible results. In fact, it is needed:
● To understand complex systems (living systems, ecosystems, climate systems etc.), which often requires or combines biology, physics, chemistry, environmental sciences, mathematics, etc.
● To develop technical objects to measure or act, which requires engineering, systems science, information and communication sciences and communication in nanotechnologies, but also often knowledge associated with the object being measured, or the object on which we want to take action (environment, ecosystem, energy management system, the living world).
● To understand the interactions between these objects and human activities, which requires different skills, risk sciences, economics, management, humanities and cultural sciences.
● To turn the object or service resulting from this research into an industrial reality.
