Every year, the Vladimir Potanin Foundation holds the All-Russian competition for teaching staff and master's degree students targeted at grant support of higher education. Participants of the contest are 75 leading universities of the country. This year, one of the winners is Natalia Naumenko, Candidate of Engineering Sciences, Associate Professor of the Department of Food and Biotechnology of SUSU’s School of Medical Biology, who developed a project for students entitled “Innovations in food biotechnology: project approach” in co-authorship with Doctor of Engineering Sciences, Professor Irina Potoroko.
This year, 1730 people submitted applications for the contest; 941 applications were accepted; 100 lecturers became the winners. The most popular areas were information technologies, applied computer science, mathematics (15%), economics (10%) and jurisprudence (7%). Such comparatively new and becoming popular disciplines as biotechnology, innovation studies, applied medicine, neurotechnology and intelligent robotics amounted 9%.
“The value of any education is in the possibility to put the obtained knowledge into practice. For this reason, practice-oriented approach becomes more popular and in-demand, our university included. Cooperation with scientists of the world level, including the cooperation in the frameworks of the International Laboratory for Synthesis and Analysis of Food Ingredients, allows students to obtain practically significant results while still being a master’s degree student,” says Irina Potoroko, Head of the Department of Food and Biotechnology.
Nowadays, many enterprises in Chelyabinsk and around Russia are interested in biological inventions. Among industrial partners of the Department are large and medium enterprises of food industry.
“Within the frameworks of this project implementation, students majoring in Biotechnology will have the opportunity to complete real orders from the Department’s industrial partners and accumulate experience in executing commercial projects in the sphere of food biotechnology. The training will be conducted in the form of a business game aimed at development of a complex offer for implementation of a specified commercial product,” explains author of the project, Natalia Naumenko.
.jpg)
The obtained experience will allow South Ural State University to significantly develop implementation of interactive education technologies, improve the level of education quality in general and enhance competitiveness of the Department’s alumni at the labor market.