The latest International Evaluation of Latvian Scientific Institutions, commissioned by the Ministry of Education and Science (MES) and carried out by foreign experts involved by Tehnopolis, shows significant progress compared to the previous period (until 2013) in the country as a whole. The results of this assessment are public and you can find them here.
All institutes were divided into 6 areas: natural sciences; medicine and health care; agriculture, forestry and veterinary medicine; social sciences; humanities and arts; engineering and technology.
Scientific institutions were assessed on a five-point scale on six criteria, such as research quality, impact on society and the economy, environment and infrastructure, and development potential.
The Transport and Telecommunication Institute (TSI) received grades 3 and 4. This means a good level, an important national player with significant international cooperation. Important note, grade 4 in the sections: impact on society and economy, which is significant for any scientific institution.
We are proud that a private institution, given significant restrictions in attracting funding for science (lack of basic funding, restrictions on funds from EU structural funds, etc.), has surpassed many public universities and institutions in its direction. Moreover, in these reports you can find a very interesting indicator – the amount of funding per researcher and compare the effectiveness and performance of these investments between institutions.
Unfortunately, targeted additional funding is not planned for private research institutes, although the Ministry of Education and Science notes that the current funding mechanism needs to be seriously updated. In this regard, the Transport and Telecommunication Institute hopes that attention will also be paid to scientists in private scientific institutions, since they also constitute the human capital of Latvia and make Latvia better known in the scientific world.
Of course, TSI has room to grow and improve.
- We are working to increase the number of doctoral students working in an important direction for the Latvian economy – engineering, by attracting European funds to support doctoral students (see here – the D-CODE project), we provide our own grants for doctoral studies (the next competition for TSI grants for doctoral studies is expected on April 5), have begun the implementation of the concept of “industrial” doctoral studies in the aviation industry and intelligent logistics.
- We are working not only to increase the number of publications, but also to increase their quality.
- In recent years, we have been paying a lot of attention to internationalization. Our academic and scientific staff already include scientists from Japan, Mexico, Kazakhstan, Egypt and other countries. We continue to cooperate with many international partners in the framework of ongoing projects in the programs Horizon 2020, ERASMUS1 +, and INTERREG Central Baltic.
Congratulations to the TSI team on this achievement and wish you further success on our way!
Board of the Transport and Telecommunications Institute
