Professor Kim Barrett is the Dean of the Graduate Division at UCSD.
"We have interactions with many universities worldwide that involve the exchange of faculty and students, with major concentrations in Europe and China. But the program with Simula and UiO is relatively unique with respect to the quality and depth of interactions and the support it enjoys from the central government", Barrett says.
"Simula is highly respected for its advances in the area of computational science, for the quality of its scientists, and for its approaches to problem solving. Indeed, when Simula was seeking a U.S. partner to pursue more in depth interactions, there was considerable competition between several prestigious institutions to become that partner,"she adds.
The educational programme is a shared PhD programme, which will focus on computational science within the field of biomedicine. 15 students will be accepted to the programme annually, and they will conduct research on subjects that combine and require the unique expertise of the three partner institutions. The study period will be divided between UCSD in California and Simula at Fornebu, and the degree will be awarded by the University of Oslo. After the completion of the programme, the students will be highly qualified candidates for attractive positions in research based industries both in Norway and internationally.
UCSD is a highly recognised university that has, for the last ten years, been listed amongst the top 15 universities in the world. Managing Director of Simula, professor Aslak Tveito, is very pleased that the funding for the programme is in place.
"Simula has had a strong research collaboration with UCSD for several years, and we are now happy that we can step it up a notch. The funding enables us to develop the collaborative effort and offer a PhD education of a very high quality", Tveito says.
The educational programme has been named SUURPh, which is an acronym for “The Simula-UiO-UCSD Research and PhD training programme”.
Summer school in full operation
The Summer School of Computational Physiology is a corner stone in the SUURPh programme. Simula has joined forces with UCSD and UiO in order to establish the Summer School, which was arranged for the first time last year. 25 talented students at the PhD and Master level from UCSD, UiO, and several European countries have been accepted and are presently in full swing with their studies.
The students spend the first part of the summer at Fornebu, where they will receive tutoring. In August, they will travel to San Diego in order to do course work and a final exam.
Photo gallery from the SUURPh opening
