CARPE consortium: meeting of the governing body

Leading members of CARPE (Consortium on Applied Research and Professional Education) met in Brussels over the weekend. Representing the University of Debrecen, Deputy Rector for Research and Education László Csernoch and Scientific Director Zsolt Varga attended the meeting.

The University of Debrecen (UD) joined CARPE in 2015. The consortium had been founded in 2011 by European universities with a strong profile in applied research, located outside the capital cities of the founders (in Hamburg, Utrecht, Valencia, Turku, Glasgow and Porto), yet belonging to the most important institutions of higher education on the basis of their size and significance in their respective countries.

The agenda of the meeting held in Brussels on March 1 focused on the participants’ discussion with the competent experts from the European Commission concerning the current opportunities to apply for funding the so-called Smart Cities Initiatives and European Universities Alliances.
At the meeting session, László Csernoch presented the recently launched Pannonia Scholarship Program, which will also provide an additional opportunity to promote cooperation between consortium partners.

The meeting participants also reviewed the tasks for the upcoming period, with particular attention to the activities of the Special Interest Groups (SIGs) and the next CARPE conference to be held in Porto in 2025, where several faculty members from the University of Debrecen are also expected to participate.

There was a unanimous consensus among the representatives from all of the participating institutions on how the future of higher education lies in building and strengthening networks and projects of collaboration between the individual university research groups.
Within the framework of CARPE, there have already been several EU projects set up in cooperation with the faculties of UD including that of the Humanities, Health Sciences, Economics, Informatics, Agriculture, Food and Environmental Sciences, Engineering, Science and Technology, in a number of fields such as social inclusion and integration, sustainability, transport development and data management.

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