CVU (SECIHTI, Formerly CONACYT): Mexico’s Researcher CV Number, Rizoma Registration, and the Fields That Block Your Application

The CVU (Curriculum Vitae Único) is the researcher identity number SECIHTI assigns you once, and then expects to see attached to every scholarship, grant and SNII application you ever file in Mexico. It is not a document you write and upload. It is a number tied to a curricular record held on SECIHTI’s own platform, and no convocatoria will let you register a solicitud without one.

Most CVU walkthroughs online still describe a capture screen that is no longer the route for scholarship and SNII applications. The agency has been renamed twice and the platform has moved. This guide covers what the CVU is now, how to register or recover one, and — the part that actually costs people deadlines — which specific profile fields have to be populated before the platform will let you submit at all.

The three-name problem: CONACYT, CONAHCYT, SECIHTI

If you are searching for “CVU CONACYT” you are using the right term for the wrong decade, and you are in the majority. The agency has carried three names:

• CONACYT — Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología, the name most people still search for and the one printed on older constancias.
• CONAHCYT — Consejo Nacional de Humanidades, Ciencias y Tecnologías, the intermediate name adopted after the 2023 Ley General en Materia de Humanidades, Ciencias, Tecnologías e Innovación added humanidades to the mandate.
• SECIHTI — Secretaría de Ciencia, Humanidades, Tecnología e Innovación, the current and authoritative name. SECIHTI replaced CONAHCYT effective 1 January 2025, when the body was converted from a decentralised council into a cabinet-level federal secretariat.

Your CVU number did not change when the agency did. A CVU issued under CONACYT is the same CVU under SECIHTI — same digits, same record. You do not re-register because of the rename, and you should be sceptical of any service offering to “migrate” or “update” your CVU for a fee.

One practical wrinkle worth knowing before you start clicking: several of SECIHTI’s own login URLs still sit on the old conacyt.mx and conahcyt.mx domains. Landing on a page branded with a former name is not a sign you have followed a phishing link or reached a dead system — the institutional rename has run ahead of the domain migration. Check the link against SECIHTI’s own services page rather than judging by the domain string alone.

For what the restructure changed at the funding-programme level, see our guide to SECIHTI’s restructured science ministry.

Where the CVU actually lives now: Rizoma and the Perfil Único

This is the single most important thing to get right, and the thing most third-party CVU guides have wrong.

SECIHTI has moved curricular capture into Rizoma, a platform organised around a Perfil Único (PU) — a “single profile” that supersedes the old standalone CVU capture screens. On SECIHTI’s own Perfil Único (PU) y CVU services page, the routing is explicit:

• For BECAS and SNII applications → Rizoma / Perfil Único. This is the current route, and the only one that matters for scholarship and national-researcher-system applicants.
• New users register through SECIHTI’s registration portal to create an account before building the profile.
• The legacy CVU login still exists, hosted on the MIIC system, and SECIHTI still points users to it to enter the CVU or recover a password for a specific set of older systems it names: IxMéxico, EFIDT, Fosec and PeopleSoft.

So the honest description of the current state is coexistence, not replacement. The CVU number persists as your durable identifier. Rizoma’s Perfil Único is the interface where you now build and maintain the record behind it for becas and SNII. The legacy CVU screen has not been switched off, but it is not where you go to apply for a scholarship.

Because SECIHTI reorganises these entry points periodically, always start from SECIHTI’s own Servicios en línea section at secihti.mx rather than from a bookmarked deep link or a URL copied out of a forum post. A stale deep link is the most common reason an applicant believes the system is “down”.

How to register a CVU, step by step

1. Create the account first, then the profile. Registration and profile capture are two separate stages. You create credentials through SECIHTI’s registration portal; the curricular record is built afterwards inside Rizoma.
2. Have your CURP to hand. The CURP is the spine of Mexican federal identity records and the field most likely to cause a hard stop if it does not match your other documents. Confirm the exact string against your official CURP printout — not from memory, and not from an old form.
3. Use an email address you will still control in five years. Institutional addresses expire when you change institution, and losing the registered email is the single most common cause of a locked CVU. A personal address you keep permanently is the safer choice.
4. Complete the profile sections — the ones that gate submission are listed in the next section, and they are not all of them.
5. Only then open the convocatoria and register the solicitud. The profile must already be complete; the application form will not let you fill the gaps retroactively.

Do not leave profile completion until the closing week of a convocatoria. Because the blocking fields are validated at the moment you try to register the solicitud — not when you save the profile — an incomplete section surfaces as a failure at exactly the point where you have the least time to fix it.

The fields that block submission

This is where CVU applications are actually lost, and it is poorly documented outside SECIHTI’s own postulación guides. A profile that looks finished on screen can still refuse to let you register a solicitud, because certain fields are validated as prerequisites for the application itself, not merely as profile content.

Two requirements are stated explicitly in SECIHTI’s own guides for the Becas en el Extranjero calls:

1. Both primary contact means — email and telephone

To initiate any application in the open foreign-scholarship calls, SECIHTI’s guidance requires that you have registered both an email address and a telephone or mobile number, designated as medio de contacto principal. Registering one and not the other is enough to block the application.

This is the trap most worth checking first, because it is invisible: a profile with a valid email and no phone number looks complete on every screen that displays it, and the contact section is not where an applicant expects an academic application to fail.

2. Trayectoria Académica — and only that, within Educación

Within the Educación area of the Perfil Único, SECIHTI’s guidance identifies Trayectoria Académica as the subsection required to register an application in the open Becas en el Extranjero calls. This cuts both ways, and both are useful:

• You cannot skip it. An otherwise rich profile with an empty academic trajectory will not submit.
• You do not have to complete the entire Educación area to apply. Applicants routinely burn days trying to populate every subsection under Educación, believing the platform demands an exhaustive record before it will release the application. For these calls, that is the requirement to clear.

3. The profile itself must be validated, not merely present

SECIHTI’s postulación guidance for the postgraduate Becas en el Extranjero calls states that before registering a scholarship application it is necessary to create, update or validate your CVU within the Perfil Único of Rizoma, describing this as an indispensable requirement. “Update or validate” matters: an old CVU that has sat untouched for years is not automatically in a submittable state. If you have not opened your profile since it was a CONACYT-era record, assume it needs a validation pass before you rely on it against a deadline.

What we could not verify, and are not going to invent

We verified the three requirements above against SECIHTI’s own published guides for the Becas en el Extranjero calls. We could not verify a complete, field-by-field list of blocking requirements for every SECIHTI programme, and specifically not a separate list for SNII applications, which run on the same Perfil Único but under their own convocatoria rules. SECIHTI’s Rizoma registration guide is published as a screenshot-based PDF whose text is not machine-readable, so its field list could not be extracted and confirmed.

Treat the list above as the verified floor rather than the exhaustive set, and read the specific convocatoria you are applying under — each call publishes its own requisitos, and those govern. Where a guide on any site presents a confident full enumeration of blocking fields without citing the convocatoria it came from, it is describing a remembered flow, not a current one.

What the CVU is, and what it is not

• It is a national administrative identifier — assigned by one government body, used across that body’s programmes, and meaningful within Mexico’s federal science administration.
• It is not a global persistent identifier. A CVU is not resolvable on the open web, is not minted against an international registry, and does not travel with you internationally. See persistent identifier (PID) for what that distinction means in practice.
• It does not replace your ORCID iD. The two answer different questions: ORCID says who you are to publishers, funders and repositories worldwide; the CVU says who you are to SECIHTI. Maintain both. If you only ever maintain one, maintain ORCID — it is the one an international publisher or funder will ask for.
• It is not proof of SNII membership. Everyone who applies has a CVU; only those who are accepted hold an SNII distinction. Conflating the two is common on CVs and is easily caught.
• It is not a document. There is nothing to write in Word and upload. The “CV” in the name describes structured records held on the platform, not a file.

Recovering a lost CVU number or password

Two genuinely different problems get confused here, and the fix differs:

• You have lost the number itself. The CVU is displayed within your profile once you are logged in, so recovering access recovers the number. It also appears on prior constancias and on any past application correspondence — often the fastest route if you still have the email.
• You have lost access to the account. This is the harder case, and the recovery route depends on which system holds your credentials. SECIHTI’s services page directs users to the legacy CVU login specifically to enter the CVU or recover a password for the older systems it names, while account access for current becas and SNII work runs through Rizoma.

The genuinely difficult case is a lost registered email address — typically an institutional account deactivated after you left. A self-service password reset cannot help when the reset message is sent to a mailbox you can no longer open, and this is where applicants lose the most time. That case needs SECIHTI’s Centro de Contacto directly, with your CURP and any documentation carrying your CVU. SECIHTI publishes a contact number of (55) 5322-7700; confirm the current number and hours on its site before calling, as contact details change more often than platform URLs.

We have deliberately not reproduced a step-by-step password-reset sequence here. The recovery screens have changed with each platform migration, and a confidently-worded set of stale instructions is worse than none — it sends you looking for buttons that are not there. Start from SECIHTI’s services page and follow the live flow.

How the CVU fits Mexico’s research-identifier stack

The CVU is the prerequisite layer beneath everything else SECIHTI runs. In practice the dependency order is: CVU and a complete Perfil Único first, then the programme application — whether that application is a beca or an SNII evaluation. On the scholarship side, the programme that sits on top of this prerequisite is Becas SECIHTI, and specifically the Becas Nacionales modality, whose SNP registration gate and Rizoma application route are documented separately.

The most consequential downstream use is the SNII, Mexico’s National Researcher System (formerly the SNI). SNII evaluation draws on the curricular record you maintain, which makes profile hygiene a substantive matter and not an administrative chore — an unrecorded publication is, for evaluation purposes, one that does not exist.

Mexico’s CVU belongs to a distinctly Latin American pattern: the state-run national researcher CV platform, where one government-held curricular record gates access to national funding. Its closest analogues are Colombia’s CvLAC, Brazil’s Lattes Platform, and Argentina’s CVar. Comparable national systems outside the region include Portugal’s CIÊNCIAVITAE, Japan’s e-Rad Researcher Number and India’s VIDWAN.

If you work across several of these, the practical discipline is to treat ORCID as the record you keep authoritative and the national platforms as the ones you reconcile to it — the reverse quickly becomes unmaintainable. See researcher identifier for the general concept, and the persistent identifiers and research information systems pillar for how these systems interoperate.

Frequently asked questions

Is the CVU the same thing as CVU CONACYT?

Yes. “CVU CONACYT” is the older name for the same identifier, still in wide use because the agency was renamed twice — CONACYT to CONAHCYT to SECIHTI — while researchers kept using the original phrasing. Your number is unaffected by the renames.

Do I need a CVU to apply for an SECIHTI scholarship?

Yes. A CVU with a complete Perfil Único is a prerequisite for registering an application; SECIHTI’s postulación guidance describes creating, updating or validating it as an indispensable requirement before you register a solicitud.

Why won’t the platform let me submit my application?

Check the two requirements most likely to be silently incomplete: that you have registered both an email address and a telephone number as primary contact means, and that Trayectoria Académica under Educación is populated. Both are stated in SECIHTI’s guides as prerequisites for registering an application in the Becas en el Extranjero calls. Then check your specific convocatoria for requisitos beyond those.

Does the CVU expire?

The number itself is not something you renew on a schedule the way you would a licence. The record behind it, however, goes stale — and SECIHTI’s guidance to “update or validate” the profile before applying means a long-dormant CVU should not be assumed ready to use against a deadline.

Is there a cost to register a CVU?

Registration is a government administrative process rather than a paid service. Any third party charging to create, recover or “unlock” a CVU is selling you something SECIHTI provides directly — verify current terms on SECIHTI’s own site before paying anyone.

Can I have a CVU without a postgraduate degree?

The CVU exists to support applicants across SECIHTI’s programmes, including scholarship applicants who are applying precisely because they do not yet hold the degree they are seeking funding for. Eligibility for a given programme is set by that programme’s convocatoria, not by the CVU itself.

Do I still use the old CVU login?

For becas and SNII, no — those run through Rizoma’s Perfil Único. SECIHTI still points users to the legacy CVU login for a specific set of older systems it names: IxMéxico, EFIDT, Fosec and PeopleSoft.

Sources

This guide was written against SECIHTI’s own published material: its Perfil Único (PU) y CVU services page for current platform routing and support contact, and its published guides for the Becas en el Extranjero calls for the profile requirements that gate application submission. Programme requirements are set by each individual convocatoria, which is the governing document in any conflict with this or any other secondary guide.