The latest edition of the QS World University Rankings, which came out June 10, places the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology at No. 281 globally, up 21 positions from last year’s results. The Institute has the highest standing of all Russian technical universities featured in the league table. This makes MIPT one of just three universities in its country to be listed among the top 300 schools worldwide according to both Quacquarelli Symonds and Times Higher Education. The other two institutions earning that distinction are Lomonosov Moscow State University and the Higher School of Economics.
Along with two other prominent university rankings — compiled by THE and the ShanghaiRanking Consultancy — the one published by QS is highly regarded in the academic, professional, and student communities. In Russia, a university’s position in the QS rankings is one of the key performance indicators for institutions participating in Project 5-100, the nation’s academic excellence program.
QS compares and ranks universities based on six criteria: academic reputation, employer reputation, citations per faculty, the student-faculty ratio, international student ratio, and international faculty ratio.
In 2020, MIPT improved its score for academic reputation, which is calculated based on a global poll of researchers and educators, who are asked to name the institutions that they believe stand out in terms of academic and scientific excellence.
The number of citations per MIPT faculty member has also grown, according to the data of the Scopus database, which is used by the rankings. The Institute has also secured a higher position in terms of the international student metric. It measures the ratio between the foreign and the domestic students a school enrolls and reflects to what extent it is attractive to learners from abroad.
“For MIPT, rankings are not a goal in and of themselves. They rather reflect the real changes that are taking place. For four years running, we have been featured among the world’s top 100 universities for physics according to QS, but we are not stopping at that. We are advancing and emphasizing both the traditional fields of engineering sciences, chemistry, and mathematics, and the cutting-edge areas, such as artificial intelligence and genomic technology. The latter two have seen MIPT establish two world-class research centers and launch the complementary degree programs to support them, all in the course of the past three years. Studies conducted at the interface between different areas of science enable highly relevant research projects and educational programs that attract the brightest young minds. This has allowed us to incentivize quality personnel to not seek employment abroad, and we have even reclaimed more than 50 young Russian specialists with prior experience of work in other countries. The strength of MIPT is in its broad cooperation with the leading research institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and high-tech companies. It puts us in a much better position to speed up the transfer of technologies from exploratory research into applied science,” MIPT Rector Nikolay Kudryavtsev said.
“MIPT has gone beyond its traditional competences in physics,” added Vitaly Bagan, the Institute’s vice rector for science and development programs. “In 2017, we became the founding institution for a new competence center for artificial intelligence research. Last year MIPT was joined by a number of institutions in a large consortium to open the world-class research Center for Genomic Technology and Bioinformatics. We are also planning to set up a Center for Graphene and Novel 2D Materials. Behind each of these initiatives, there is breakthrough research, whose international recognition is reflected in the increasing number of citations and growing academic reputation.”
In 2020, MIPT was also listed among the best universities in two broad subject areas of the QS World University Rankings by Faculty. For the first time it placed as high as No. 67 for natural sciences, as well as securing a No. 202 position for engineering and technology. In the QS rankings by subject, which use a more fine-grained list of areas, the Institute has retained its standing among the top 100 universities to study physics and astronomy, and remained in the top 150 bracket for mathematics. MIPT has also climbed the computer science and information systems rankings to the 151-200 band and the chemistry rankings to the 351-400 band. Besides making it into the top 300 list for electrical engineering, the Institute has maintained its standing in the league tables for mechanical, aeronautical and manufacturing engineering (201-250) and materials science (251-300), as well as making a comeback in the biological sciences (401-450).
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