Progress in the construction of the NICA accelerator complex

The Nuclotron-based Ion Collider fAcility (NICA) is currently under construction at JINR (Dubna, Russia). The new facility will be a significant extension of the existing Nuclotron accelerator chain and comprises a sequence of machines for providing beams from protons to gold ions, as well as polarized protons and deuterons. The main goal of the Multi-Purpose Detector (MPD) experiment at NICA will be the study of a variety of phenomena in the region of the highest net-baryon density. This paper covers the scope of the NICA/MPD project and describes the recent progress in its realization.