Slovenia is ready for full CERN membership – and so is Cosylab!
Interestingly, Slovenian researchers’ participation in CERN dates back to the 70s, during the time of the Yugoslav state, which was also one of the founders of CERN. Now, finally, Slovenia is in the process of upgrading its status as an associate member of CERN (Conseil européen pour la Recherche nucléaire), the intergovernmental organisation that operates the world’s largest and highest-energy particle collider, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
A working group from CERN visited the Slovenian government and research institutions to see whether Slovenia is ready for full membership.
Twenty Slovenian firms, among them our company, have already worked or procured for CERN, and interest is rising: the year 2023 was the most successful so far, with almost four–fifths of all Slovenia‘s CERN membership fee — approximately 1.7 million Swiss francs – “returning home“ in the form of contracts with Slovenian companies.
Cosylab has delivered accelerator control systems for FAIR for over a decade.
Charlotte Lindberg Warakaulle, Director of international relations at CERN, emphasises the importance of cooperation between industry, science and CERN, which can be a complex balancing act for new full-member states.
Rok Šabjan, Deputy COO of Cosylab, adds, “Traditionally, in our country, the scientific and research part of participation with CERN was always strong. On the other hand, many commercial organisations did not recognise the advantages of collaborating with CERN. This is now changing for the better! As a global Big Science services and solutions provider for more than two decades, Cosylab recognised the business opportunities at CERN early on. For us, the main challenge now is increasing the share of Slovenian high value-added, complex services to CERN.“