First students started studies in programme taught in Estonia, France, Finland and Sweden
This academic year, eighteen students started their master’s studies in the first Erasmus Mundus joint programme created by an Estonian university where in the two year master’s programme, all students complete their first year of studies in Tartu and second year in one of the three following universities: Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1 in France, Åbo Akademi in Finland and Uppsala University in Sweden.
The joint master’s programme Excellence in Analytical Chemistry received 1.95 million euros from the European Union and there are students from Ukraine, China, India, Jordan, Congo, Nepal, Nigeria, Montenegro, Serbia, Macedonia, USA and Estonia.
“This is a new level of international education which we are now able to offer in Estonia thanks to the Erasmus Mundus joint programme. On the one hand, it is a great acknowledgement and it is also a sign of quality which helps to improve the quality of chemistry studies in the University of Tartu,” said the coordinator of the programme, Professor of Analytical Chemistry at the University of Tartu Ivo Leito.
“The best assets of the three partner universities—industrial chemical analysis, sensors and biochemical analysis—are an excellent addition to the University of Tartu’s strengths which lie in the fundamental topics of analytical chemistry and chemical metrology,” said Leito who believes that with the four universities combined, the joint programme gives the students such a great education that their competitiveness on the world level would be hard to surpass.
The students admitted to the international master’s programme in analytical chemistry spend their first year studying at the University of Tartu. For their second year, depending on their specialisation, they will go either to Lyon, Åbo Akademi or Uppsala.
Preparations for the joint programme took several years. In addition to the main partners, the curriculum involves 26 more partners from all over the world, including higher education institutions from various countries whose lecturers and researchers contribute to the studies. “When we created the curriculum, we took into consideration the needs of the labour market in this specialisation which is why our partners include industrial companies and laboratories which among other things offer our students opportunities for practical training.”
The European Union funds the curriculum Excellence in Analytical Chemistry through the Erasmus+ joint programme measure Erasmus Mundus Joint Master Degrees.
More information on the programme’s website: http://www.ut.ee/EACH/.
Additional information: Ivo Leito, UT Professor of Analytical Chemistry, tel. 518 4176, e-mail: ivo.leito [ät] ut.ee.