The Center for Scientific Research and Higher Education at Ensenada (in Spanish: Centro de Investigación Científica y de Educación Superior de Ensenada, CICESE) is a public research center sponsored by the National Council for Science and Technology of Mexico (CONACYT) in the city of Ensenada, Baja California, and specialized in Earth Sciences, Oceanography, Life Sciences and Applied Physics.

[2] Its facilities include eight buildings which house laboratories, classrooms, a specialized library, supercomputing equipment, connection to Internet 2, the oceanographic vessel Alpha Helix, and valuable seismological and oceanographic instrumentation and a library that holds more than 40,000 volumes.

[2] The center was founded in 1973 by the Mexican federal government, which aimed to create a research institution outside Mexico City (where 80% of Mexico's scientific and technical research was performed at the time).

[1] The team to found the institution was led by Raúl N. Ordarza, Emmanuel Méndez Palma and Remigio Valdés of CONACYT; Arcadio Poveda and Félix Córdoba of the National Autonomous University of Mexico and Nicolás Grijalva of the Autonomous University of Baja California's School of Marine Studies and Math professor at Scripps.

[citation needed] CICESE is organized in four divisions and fifteen academic departments.