An online meeting with delegations from the University of Sheffield and the Cormack Consultancy Group from the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland took place at Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute. This meeting is the first step in the Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute’s cooperation with a leading British university.
This became possible due to the unprecedented support of Ukraine from the British government in the Russian-Ukrainian war. In the field of higher education, British universities have proposed a so-called twinning initiative. Its mechanism is that the British university finds a Ukrainian partner, and if their interests coincide, such a partnership begins to develop.
The University of Sheffield is among the top ten in the UK and in the top 100 in the Shanghai ranking. It is known, in particular, for six Nobel laureates and groundbreaking scientific research, the budget of which reaches 150 million pounds a year.
“There are strong scientific schools here, both fundamental and applied. Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute also has outstanding achievements that are interesting to our partner, ” – said Sergii Sydorenko, Vice-Rector for International Relations.
Both universities are actively developing in the field of energy and see their interest in cooperation in this area. Radioactive waste management, introduction of small modular reactors, development of materials for reactor equipment are among the areas of interest to Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute .
“For about six months now, we have been trying to start preparing a new master’s degree program for the decommissioning of nuclear power units, and the Sheffield Institute of Energy has one. It is also important that there are developments in radioactive waste management. The training of specialists in the operation of nuclear technology is also interesting, because we have never dealt with the problem of developing nuclear reactors and related equipment. In Ukraine we traditionally train specialists in the safety of reactor operation, and this is our interest,” – explains Evgen Pysmenny, Dean of Faculty of Heat and Power Engineering of Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute.
The university believes that mechanical engineering and process modeling are also promising for cooperation. And Sheffield may be interested in the Ukrainian partner’s development in the field of materials science and electronic engineering.