Enrique Zuazua

Basque Centre for Applied Maths

Academic, research and entrepreneurial landmarks Place and year of birth: Eibar (Gipuzkoa), 1961. Higher education: -University degree in Mathematics from the University of the Basque Country/Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea (1984). Extraordinary Award from the School of Science and Technology. -Ph.D. from the University of the Basque Country/Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea (1987). Extraordinary Award from the School of Science and Technology. -Ph.D. from Pierre-and-Marie Curie University (Paris, France, 1988). ‘In the 1987-1988 academic year, I was Associate Professor at the University of the Basque Country, and then I was named Professor of Mathematical Analysis at the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM). In 1990, I became Chair of Applied Mathematics in Complutense University of Madrid, where I was the Head of the Department of Chemistry and the Department of Applied Mathematics. I also was the Head of the Department of Mathematics at the Institute of Advanced Studies of Madrid (IMDEA) and in 2001 I held a Chair of Applied Mathematics at UAM. In 2008, I was offered the chance to return to the Basque Country to set up the Basque Centre for Applied Mathematics (BCAM). At present, I am the BCAM Scientific Director. ’I heard about bizkaia:talent while I was in Madrid. I was told about their Harrera relocation service, which made all the administrative procedures easier for me when I decided to come to Bizkaia. ’We scientists coming here to build our career get enormous help from bizkaia:talent. I lived quite close, but if I had lived farther away, they would have helped me a lot anyway. If you live in Madrid, you can easily come to Bilbao to do all the paperwork, but this takes time, so they were really helpful. Besides, my wife is a foreign national, so she had to fill in a host of forms. And there were my daughters, who needed to find a school here, and we had to find a home too. They helped me with everything. ’The Harrera relocation service is very good. We scientists travel all the time and changing residence is not that easy. Arriving in a new city and dealing with all the paperwork on your own is not an easy task, so getting help from an organisation is quite something. Bizkaia:talent was different from all the similar organisations I had come across before. It has the right size and joins all efforts in a single core, which makes it more efficient. In my opinion, it is a platform that you can rely on and it should get even stronger.’