Mumbai, December 5, 2018: Last week, a senior delegation from the University of Auckland, led by Professor Jenny Dixon, Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Strategic Engagement, met with several Indian institutions to identify strategic partnerships and seek expressions of interest to establish a New Zealand Centre in India. The Centre conceptualizes participation from all 8 New Zealand universities along with New Zealand government support.
The University signed agreements of cooperation with the Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur (IIT KGP), and the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IITB) last week. The university delegation included several deans and academic staff facilitating discussion areas of mutual research interest and strengths, and proposals to collaborate to offer dual PhD’s with IIT KGP and IITB.
Professor Dixon stated, “we are very pleased with the interest we have seen from several leading Indian universities including expressions of interest to host a New Zealand Centre. In our discussions, our deans of engineering, science, and education, identified multiple areas of mutual research interest that we will be exploring with appropriate departments.”
“There are a number of potential areas for collaboration across the whole University including decision tools, computational modelling, cyber-security, as well as advanced materials, smart cities and precision medicine,” said Nic Smith, Dean of Engineering.
“I was impressed by the multiple areas for potential research collaborations, such as data science, biosciences, cancer research, new materials development, just to name a few, that we found in our discussions this week,” reported John Hosking, Dean of Science.
Both deans found considerable overlap across the two faculties of Science and Engineering and extending into medical and health sciences as regards the priority research themes from Indian institutions.
Associate Professor Partha Roop from Engineering, and Senior Research Fellow Sudip Ray from Science, both alumni of the prestigious IIT’s, participated in the visit and were instrumental in formulating University of Auckland’s Indian engagement strategy.
The University of Auckland also announced four winners of New Zealand Excellence Awards 2018/19 (NZEA), which offered partial scholarships for studying their Master’s programme. The NZEA are jointly funded by Education New Zealand and all eight New Zealand universities. This third edition of the awards will support thirty-five scholarships, with the awardees scheduled to arrive for the February 2019 intake.
