The 22nd regular meeting of the Coordinating Committee on the implementation of the Agreement on cooperation between the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and JINR was held at JINR on 23–24 February 2012. The German delegation was headed by Director General for the BMBF Department “Large Research Infrastructures, Energy and Basic Research” Dr. Beatrix Vierkorn-Rudolf, who already visited JINR in 2011 as ESFRI (the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures) Chairman. The JINR delegation was headed by JINR Director Academician V.A.Matveev. The meetings of the Committee were held at the JINR Directorate. The German delegation visited the initial linear accelerator section, the basic facility IREN and the diffractometer complex EPSILON/SKAT of the IBR-2 Pulse Reactor.

The meeting of the Committee was held on background of the recently signed prolongation of the agreement with BMBF for 2012-2014. The main JINR’s achievements in major scientific directions: NICA, IBR-2M and DRIBS-III, were traditionally emphasized in the Protocol of the meeting. The German side indicated its interest in the NICA project, and this was emphasized by participation of Director of the FAIR project Professor B.Yu.Sharkov in the meeting. Funding for educational programs for schoolchildren and German participants in the traditional summer practices held by the UC was designate for the first time explicitly in the decisions of the Committee. The German side also stressed the high efficiency of spending funds at JINR.

A discussion about the need for adjustments in the program of cooperation and new projects was the feature of the 22th meeting of the Committee. In particular, possible cooperation in the fields of astroparticle physics was discussed. In the protocol the parties noted appearance of a new high-tech project of mutual interest for separation of short-lived nuclei based on selective laser ionization at FLNR. Collaboration on that project with the participation of German physicists was launched at the workshop held in December 2011 at the Flerov Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions.

V.A.Matveev spoke about the major decisions of the Committee: "It was considered necessary to organize a special workshop on analysis of the development strategy of collaboration between scientists of Dubna and scientists of Germany. This workshop will be prepared during the year, it will be held in late February 2013 in Hamburg, before the next meeting of the Coordination Committee on cooperation". The full text of the interview of JINR Director and Head of the German delegation is published in the JINR newspaper "Dubna: science, community, progress" (in Russian).