At the end of June the Ministry of Science and Higher Education RF announced the results of the competition to participate in the National Project "Advanced Engineering Schools" (AES). The Schools will help train highly qualified personnel in priority areas of engineering and technology development. Professional engineers will participate in the project as mentors. Novosibirsk State University was the only university in the region listed among the 30 winners and will receive 84.5 million rubles for the creation of the AES "Cognitive Engineering".
The key topics for "Cognitive Engineering" will be aerospace instrumentation, biological sensor systems, and geophysical systems for the oil and gas industry. By 2030 a new educational model with an emphasis on the development of an engineering approach to thinking and related skills will result in a 10 times increase of R&D projects performed by the University in these areas as compared to 2022. This will generate more than 1.5 billion rubles annually. The project requires the transformation of NSU from research university to an entrepreneurial university whose graduates will be leaders in the formation and implementation of complex engineering projects.
Sergey Golovin, Director of the Gazpromneft-NSU Research and Education Center, talked about the project,
The key partners for the new AES model are technology entrepreneurs and leaders of innovative companies. The role of these companies is to work together with the Akademgorodok scientific base and large industry to identify technological barriers and formulate an agenda for research and development to overcome them. The role of AES is to decompose barriers into key blocks together with an entrepreneur and organize cooperation between companies, universities, and institutions. At the same time, research centers are being created at NSU for co-investment by the AES and entrepreneurs to cover the missing key skills and infrastructure. An important aspect is that the result of the activity is not specific products, but technological platforms that eliminate systemic gaps in the industry and are the basis of not one, but a whole product line. An example of a platform is the creation of technology for the production of single-walled carbon nanotubes from which OCSiAl in Akademgorodok has grown with a capitalization of more than one and a half billion dollars. The entrepreneur invests his resources and skills in the development of the NSU AES research centers and has the opportunity to manage them and influence the general framework for their development through participation in the AES Governing Council.
