As the launching project of the University of Twente’s collaboration with the Stevens Institute of Technology is taking off smoothly, time has arrived for an in-depth analysis of opportunities for invigorating the relationship. A six man delegation of the highly regarded US research university visited the campus last week to discuss more how the specific core strengths of our two universities could match. The organizing committee, consisting of Tatiana Filatova, Kris Lulofs and Oscar Peters, set up a diverse programme to find out how.
In November last year, the Stevens Institute of Technology and the University of Twente put their signatures under a strategic collaboration agreement. To get a better feeling of where joining forces is fruitful, intensive contact is needed to sense each other’s added value. It is already the second visit of a fairly large delegation to Enschede, with a first group being welcomed at the UT in February. These days Six UT students who have succeeded through a competitive selection process will depart to New York for a 2 month visit. The topic of this year is Building Urban Resilience.
This time, the Stevens delegation received insights from a whole variety of perspectives. While the two day visit was primarily hosted by the BMS Faculty of the University of Twente with a series of workshops covering various themes on public administration, philosophy, health and smart cities and a visit to the Tech4People Lab, all other faculties were also actively involved. Namely, their site visit included e.g. nano technological research projects at the NanoLab, the ITC Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation, the MIRA Experimental Centre for Technical Medicine and the Faculty of Engineering Technology (CTW).
OUTSTANDING KNOWLEDGE
Having concluded that more crosspollination in exchange of concepts and people might be of value, the UT-hosts and the visitors of Stevens looked in particular to topics where outstanding knowledge and position could proof to be of added value in the partnership. Opportunities are numerous, with for instance exchange of PhD students, setting up joint educational BSC and MSc programs and writing joint research proposals.
The visit of the delegation culminated with a start up of two project consortia initiated by different teams from the BMS faculty (CSTM, PA and STEPS departments) with the Stevens team contributing with complementary technical knowledge. Thankfully, there are quite a few funding options that allow Stevens-UT teams that find synergies to pursue their ideas in the domain of research or education.
“The most important thing is to make a connection between people”, BMS dean Theo Toonen stated. “We perceive a mutual sense of openness and collaborative attitude. That is nice to notice and will stimulate frequent peer-to-peer interaction to find these specific topics and projects where we complement each other.”
