U of A renews CNRS partnership, signs new trilateral agreement with CNRS and UNAM

In April, Suresh Garimella, president of the University of Arizona, joined Antoine Petit, chairman and CEO of France's Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), at the U of A main campus in Tucson to renew the partnership underpinning one of the university's most productive research initiatives: the France-Arizona Institute for Global Grand Challenges. 

Garimella and Petit then signed a trilateral letter of intent, co-signed by William Lee, vice provost of international affairs at Mexico's Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), accompanied by Celina Peña Guzmán, undersecretary of technological development and innovation at SECIHTI, Mexico’s national ministry of science.  

While the signing formalizes collaboration among the three countries, the relationships leading to landmark agreement span decades. U of A researchers have long collaborated with scholars in France and Mexico, separately until now, on pressing challenges at the nexus of food production, water, and energy. Over the course of two days, researchers shared highlights of those recent collaborations, beginning with the work of the France-Arizona Institute for Global Grand Challenges.  

Habitability On & Off Earth  

The relationship between the U of A and CNRS goes back decades. Today, the two institutions have produced more joint publications than any other international pairing in U of A history. That productivity traces to the Interdisciplinary and Global Environmental Studies (iGLOBES) initiative, a partnership between the U of A, CNRS, France's École Normale Supérieure, and Paris Sciences & Lettres University, established in 2008 to host researchers and students from France in U of A residencies ranging from two weeks to a year.  

In 2017, Régis Ferrière, a French mathematical ecologist with deep CNRS connections, took over leadership of iGlobes and saw in the U of A relationship the potential for something larger. When Antoine Petit became CNRS chairman and CEO the following year, he launched an ambitious program to designate International Research Centers (IRCs): Formal partnerships with select universities worldwide where deep, multi-disciplinary collaboration was already happening organically. 

Ferrière collaborated on an IRC proposal for CNRS with Joaquin Ruiz, who was then U of A Vice President of Global Environmental Futures, and in 2021, the U of A became the first CNRS  IRCs with the creation of the France-Arizona Institute for Global Grand Challenges, still under the leadership of Joaquin Ruiz, executive director, and Ferrière, deputy director.  

Within a year, the institute had funded and launched 17 projects, including pioneering the science of terraformation: How a lifeless landscape of bare rock transforms into a system sustaining microbes, plants, and eventually complex ecosystems. With complementary research at different sites and scales and with different levels of experimental controls, the work illustrates one way that the transnational partnership expands what either institution could achieve on its own.  

At Biosphere 2's Landscape Evolution Observatory (LEO) north of Tucson, researchers conduct terraforming experiments on 3,500-square-feet of sloped, steel platforms. Scientists effect large-scale manipulations of air temperature and rainfall on a million pounds of crushed basalt, discovering how it evolves from pure mineral to life-sustaining soil. CNRS researchers work with shipped batches of that same crushed basalt at the Ecotron facility in Saint-Pierre-lès-Nemours near Paris. 

Using multiple environmental simulators, each about the size of a small toolshed, investigators can vary factors such as atmospheric CO2 level, humidity, ambient and soil temperatures, light wavelengths, and microbes and plants introduced into the system. Through these facilities, scientists can conduct far more manipulations and with greater control, but at a much smaller scale.  

Ferriere described in the partnership the key advantage of information flow "in all directions": LEO observations can be used to generate hypotheses to test in the Ecotron, Ecotron findings provide another lens for interpreting developments at LEO. Without the institutional link, such experiments could happen in parallel but without ever informing one another.  

The work on terraforming has continued to evolve, now merging ecology and astrophysics into what Ferrière calls "astroecology": Using ecological theory to predict off-Earth habitability in ways that can directly inform missions planning by NASA and the European Space Agency. The work is supported by a $6 million grant from NASA’s Institute for Interdisciplinary Research in Astrobiology. In 2025, it also earned one of the inaugural Big Idea Challenge awards from the U of A Office of Research and Partnerships for a proposal titled "How to Make Mars Habitable — Again."  

Reimagining Sustainable Mining  

Alicja Babst-Kostecka, director of the U of A Center for Environmentally Sustainable Mining, has worked with CNRS chemist Claude Grison for years on developing new green technologies to address the issue of environmental impacts of mining. Legacy mining sites are contaminated with heavy metals. Certain plants draw in those metals through their roots. A breakthrough in their work came with the discovery that some plants accumulate those elements and then develop distinctive characteristics that lend themselves to industrial applications, such as catalyzing certain chemical reactions in the development of fragrances, cosmetics, and paints.  

The plants that absorb the most metals are called hyperaccumulators, and beyond industrial applications, they could play a key role in the future of mining itself. In phytomining, ores aren’t pulled from the earth through digging and explosives. Instead, mining operations would grow hyperaccumulator plants on metal-rich or contaminated land. The plants absorb and store metals as they grow. That biomass is then harvested and processed to recover the metals. In some cases, this “bio-ore,” can have metal concentrations even higher than conventionally mined lower-grade ores.  

To scale the idea, Babst-Kostecka's team is building what will be the first publicly available U.S. database of hyperaccumulator species, cataloging specimens collected over decades. The collaboration has already funded joint Ph.D. projects between U of A and the University of Montpellier, and a new project will bring a CNRS Ph.D. student to Tucson to study whether aging solar panels leach metals into the soil below: A new area of exploration for hyperaccumulators and a question that links mining research directly to agrivoltaics.  

Agrivoltaics Around the World  

Agrivoltaics, a food and energy production model that collocates solar panels and agricultural production on the same land, illustrates the power of scientists and students coming together in trilateral collaborations.  

"We wouldn't be here today if it wasn't for more than a decade of relationship-building," said Greg Barron-Gafford, director of Food, Energy, and Water Resilience Solutions at Biosphere 2 and one of the research leads bridging the three countries.  

The concept behind agrivoltaics is straightforward: Rather than forcing a choice between food and energy production on increasingly stressed land — a false dichotomy that farmers and communities are increasingly confronting — design systems that produce both. It’s a simple idea, but the benefits of agrivoltaics are manifold.  

Solar panels mounted over crop rows create shade, lowering heat and water stress for the plants below. Plants naturally release moisture through transpiration, which in turn cools the panels and improves their efficiency and lifespan. That bi-directional cooling effect also matters for people, a critical issue as the planet’s warming climate creates greater heat-related risks for field workers. Skin temperatures in the shade of agrivoltaic panels can run up to 20℉ lower compared to measures taken in open sun.  

Another benefit: Water conservation. Rainwater and naturally occurring moisture, even in arid lands, concentrates under the panels. That accumulation allows farmers to extend intervals between irrigations as compared to conventional farming. In field trials, some leafy greens grown under panels can go a full week between waterings, while the same crops in open sun need water after four days, and yields have increased as much as 30%.  

Solutions at a Global Scale  

The work around agrivoltaics proves the power of transnational collaboration for solving global problems, from conceptual models by German scientists, to early installations in Japan, to the robust experimentation of French researcher Christian Dupraz who led pioneering projects at the French National Institute for Agriculture, Food, and Environment beginning in 2010. Today, CNRS carries forward deep, basic-science capacity for the work, as well as access to significant European funding channels, while the U of A contributes faculty expertise, facilities, and a global research network through the Semi-Arid Lab for Scaling Agrivoltaics.  

UNAM runs Mexico's first full-scale agrivoltaics pilot at its Mexico City campus. Their work in agrivoltaics includes exploring applications for agrivoltaics in cities and the transitional spaces between densely populated regions and surrounding rural lands, known as “peri-urban” spaces. William Lee, UNAM vice provost of international affairs, noted in remarks during the April 15 session that trilateral cooperation can do real work toward resolving the policy and legal barriers to deployment — problems no single country's research community can solve alone.  

The U of A brings systems-ecology expertise led by Barron-Gafford, the large-scale research facilities of Biosphere 2, and a network of additional international collaborators and research sites, including in Kenya, Tanzania, Morocco, and southern Israel, in addition to field sites across the southwestern United States. The platform organizing future agrivoltaics work is SALSAv, the Semi-Arid Lab for Scaling Agrivoltaics, a consortium led by Barron-Gafford and Joaquin Ruiz, executive director of the France-Arizona Institute. SALSAv brings together CNRS and UNAM; the Ministry of Economics and Ministry of Education & Culture in Sonora, Mexico; Morocco's Mohammed VI Polytechnic University, the U.S. Northern Lab of the Rockies, and others.  

"This moment builds on a strong foundation," said Jenny Lee, U of A chief international affairs officer and dean of Arizona International. "We already have a deep and productive history of collaboration with CNRS and with UNAM and other partners in Mexico. What we had not done is come together as a collective, and that’s what makes this moment exciting. This agreement lays a foundation for tackling these grand challenges shared not just across our three countries, but all around the world, and overcome those challenges together."  

An emerging East African node for agrivoltaics, with research sites in Kenya and Tanzania, has expanded the research network to a fourth continent where, in May 2026, SALSAv will extend U of A presence nearly 10,000 miles to participate in the Africa Forward Summit in Nairobi. But as more scholars, farmers, officials, and industry leaders come together around agrivoltaics, perhaps nothing demonstrates the technology’s growing global momentum better than the biweekly online seminar series Agrovoltaicos sin Fronteras. In the six months since its launch, the group has already grown to include more than 400 international participants, with real-time translation technology allowing speakers and listeners to seamlessly transcend the language gaps among them.