This year marks the 10th anniversary of the EuroTech Universities Alliance—a strategic partnership of leading European universities of science and technology. Rasmus Larsen, Executive Vice President, Provost, talks about the alliance and his own experiences with it.
Technical University of Denmark (DTU) and Technisches Universität München (TUM) took the initiative to establish the alliance, which today also includes École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Technische Universiteit Eindhoven (TU/e), École Polytechnique in Paris (L'X), and Israel Institute of Technology (Technion).
All six universities are rooted in the polytechnic tradition that began with École Polytechnique in Paris in 1794. DTU is quite simply founded on the inspiration that the physicist Hans Christian Ørsted brought home from Paris after having visited and presented his discovery of electromagnetism at École Polytechnique.
The polytechnic tradition consists of a vision to benefit society on a scientific and technical basis. The six universities are therefore all drivers for a successful development of the business sector in their respective countries.
"The collaboration across the EuroTech universities serves as a great inspiration for the shared ambition to broaden the boundaries of our knowledge, to set an agenda for tomorrow’s engineering education, and to create the best framework for sustainable growth and prosperity in our countries."
Rasmus Larsen
All six universities pursue excellence and are continuously found at the top of various university rankings, for example World University Research Ranking which is based on three key aspects: research multidisciplinarity, research impact and research collaborativeness. Here, DTU, Tu\e, and EPFL rank among the top 5 universities in the world.
The value of the EuroTech alliance for researchers
In the alliance, we want to create the best opportunities for university researchers by forming new collaborations, by creating access to research infrastructure throughout the alliance, and by positioning ourselves in the best possible way to participate in European research programmes.
And EuroTech has been really successful in achieving this. In the seven-year European Horizon 2020 research framework programme, which ran from 2014-2020, the EuroTech universities were granted more than EUR 1 billion in research funding. DTU alone has obtained funding of DKK 2 billion.
As a researcher, I myself have taken part in this work. I am a professor of image analysis and, on behalf of alliance, I organized a series of workshops between researchers from the EuroTech universities in the field of medical imaging. I experienced an immediate trust between the participants and immediately felt on the same wavelength with the others. And in the two days we spent in the alliance’s office in Brussels and at TUM in Munich, respectively, we had formed consortia resulting in four successful research applications.
Other opportunities offered by the EuroTech partnership
In the alliance, we have created a series of 1-to-1 educational partnerships that provide EuroTech university students with opportunities beyond what is available at their home university.
And in the field of entrepreneurship, a key element for all polytechnic universities, we have—thanks to a European Venture Programme—provided university start-ups access to mentors, markets, and investments across the six countries.
You can therefore say that the collaboration across the EuroTech universities—at both research, educational, and university management level—serves as a great inspiration for the shared ambition to broaden the boundaries of our knowledge, to set an agenda for tomorrow’s engineering education, and to create the best framework for sustainable growth and prosperity in our countries.