The merger of business and academia – a widely used model at the world's top research institutions – has finally come to Ukraine.
From now on, Kyiv students
studying electronics will have the opportunity to hone their skills at a unique
research and development center focused on energy efficiency and automation
technologies.
The research center opened on
April 24 in the Kyiv National Polytechnical University (KNPU), Ukraine’s
largest technical educational institution, which enrolls about fifty thousand
students from all over the world each year.
The Hr 2.5 million ($312,000)
project was implemented by ABB, a Swiss-Swedish power and automation technology
giant operating in Ukraine for more than 20 years.
An astounding 60 percent of ABB employees in Ukraine are KNPU graduates, according to company, which
put two years of working into the center and pins high hopes on it.
“Prospective engineers should
have the opportunity to work with technologies, the knowledge of which will be
required at their future working places. That’s why we launched the project
establishing education centers in leading technical universities of Ukraine,”
says Dmytro Zhdanov, ABB head in Ukraine. “This way ABB is making a long-term
investment into Ukraine’s energy and industrial sectors,” he adds.
The center will also serve as
an advanced training destination for university graduates and young
specialists. It occupies four laboratories in one of the university’s buildings
and is equipped with up-to-date facilities. So far it operates in test mode but
is expected to start working at full steam in September.
“In Ukraine it’s the first
center of its kind. It knows no equals in Russia. Just a few European
Universities have similar ones,” Sergiy Peresada, deputy head at one of
university’s departments said at the opening ceremony.
The ceremony showcased one of
the center’s laboratories, already running in test mode for more than a year
and involving about 100 students. More are expected to enroll now when the
center is opened.
“It enables us to work with
electronic appliances, not just learn how they work in theory. So, we will be
able to deal with it at work,” said Oleksandr Tsybrovsky, a third-year student
of high voltages electrophysics department in KNPU.
Kyiv Post staff writer
Anastasia Forina can be reached at [email protected]
