15 years activities of Politecnico di Torino in Uzbekistan: a model to export

On 22^nd April 2024, it was celebrated 15 years activities of the Turin Polytechnic University in Tashkent (TTPU). TTPU was born from an agreement signed in 2009 with Politecnico di Torino as part of an objective of renewal and strengthening of the technical-scientific culture promoted by the institutions and the socio-economic fabric of Uzbekistan. It is now an established reality in the country and the entire region: there have been 1,500 Uzbek graduates in the past fifteen years, with the involvement of 60 PoliTO professors each year in teaching activities; currently, over 2,000 students are enrolled in double degree courses.

"Celebrating this milestone has an extremely important meaning because it testifies to 15 years of full collaboration between our university and Uzbekistan, a country undergoing strong economic and social development", comments the Rector of the Polytechnic, Stefano Corgnati, who continues: "We have been able to significantly contribute to TTPU's primary mission: training the country's leadership class and expert engineers, establishing a true campus in Tashkent, recognized throughout Central Asia. The cultural heritage accumulated in these 15 years and the recent openings towards the industrial and political-institutional context project our activity in Uzbekistan towards strengthening the other two institutional missions of research and technology transfer, with the prospects of joint work between Politecnico di Torino and Turin Polytechnic University in Tashkent aimed at accompanying the Asian country towards the necessary ecological and digital transitions".

From the perspective of educational offerings, the areas of collaboration include Mechanical Engineering, Vehicle Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, Civil Engineering, and Computer Engineering, for which the PoliTO degree is awarded to TTPU students based on a double degree agreement. Recently, a professionalizing degree in Manufacturing Industry Technologies has been launched, a requalification and lifelong learning initiative that has further strengthened relations with the Uzbek industrial sector.

More recently, Politecnico di Torino and TTPU have jointly promoted technology transfer activities involving Italian and Uzbek knowledge and entrepreneurial systems in a more organic and structural manner, fostering, for example, the launch of a project on Industry 4.0 in the Andijan region involving the Uzbek company Uzavtosanoat in collaboration with the Turin CIM4.0 Competence Center for the digital transformation of the industrial sector.

Thanks to the consolidation of this collaboration and also to the constant support of the Italian Embassy in Tashkent, PoliTO and TTPU are carrying out an increasingly broad and organic action in Uzbekistan, establishing new collaborations with other universities in the country for student and researcher mobility and promoting actions on strategic themes such as renewable energy sources - especially the development of the green hydrogen value chain - and aspects of enhancement and preservation of the historical-artistic heritage.

Issues related to the security of natural resources such as water, the planning of modern civil, energy, and digital infrastructures, climate policies towards COP29, and the development of value chains for enabling raw materials for new technologies will therefore be at the heart of the new collaboration between the two universities in service of the broader and now systemic relations between Italy and Uzbekistan, as evidenced by the recent visit of the President of the Italian Republic, Sergio Mattarella, to Uzbekistan, which saw TTPU among the selected stops precisely for its clearest example of fruitful collaboration between the two nations.

The example of the Turin Polytechnic University in Tashkent represents a winning model that the Politecnico di Torino intends to replicate in other contexts. In particular, in Latin America, the University has already established solid agreements with numerous university institutions and is now ready for a campus based on the TTPU model: "We intend to propose a model that complements the educational activities already present in the South American region, which has always been a basin from which we attract talents, especially for more specialized training levels", explains the Rector. "Always with an eye on attraction, we are ready to take on the challenge of North America: Turin is inherently an attractive city, both for quality and cost of living, but also for its characteristics as a welcoming territory, rich in natural beauty and history. Our Politecnico, especially in certain degree courses, is increasingly characterized as a quality university for international students interested in studying abroad. We will therefore launch a series of collaboration and promotion activities in the North American region to make ourselves better known".

Finally, the Mediterranean countries: "Here, in the future, there will be a way to imagine a model similar to what we have proposed in the last 15 years to the countries of Asia. For our university, it will be a great challenge to continue to further improve the already high quality of our students, even in a period of demographic winter in our continent", concludes Corgnati.

The goal is to further increase the percentage of international students at the University, already one of the highest in Italy with about 20% of enrollees coming from over 100 countries, which have grown by 48% in the last 5 years, reaching over 7,200 students today.