Members of the Expert Mining Council, which met on March 28th, 2018 at NUST MISIS, have highly valued the results of the NUST MISIS College of Mining’s transformation and its integration into the world’s scientific and educational community. Leonid Vaisberg, member of the NUST MISIS International Scientific Advisory Council, noted that the university’s strategy for modernizing the mining field is flourishing after 4 years of integration.
In 2016, NUST MISIS entered the QS World University Rankings by Subject “Engineering — Mineral & Mining,” taking 31st, and in 2017 it strengthened its position, rising 1 spot into 30th. Alevtina Chernikova, Rector of NUST MISIS, noted that the Expert Mining Council has played an important role in the development of not only the College of Mining but the entire university too. Profound transformation processes in the research and educational spheres have been made with the council’s help and support.
“The number of scientific publications of the University`s employees has increased 6 times since 2014, and last year alone by one and a half times. The volume of attracted funds for R&D implementation has increased by [an additional] half, and the number of trained PhD students and [undergraduate] students has increased significantly”, said Aleksander Myaskov, Head of the NUST MISIS College of Mining.
According to Myaskov, to take the next step, the College of Mining needs to make several important decisions. In particular, those steps are: finalizing and adopting the university`s international development strategy; identifying several breakthrough research areas and focusing effort on them by transforming the existing department structure in favor of the preservation and development of scientific schools; paying more attention to applied projects on the national level; restructuring the learning process towards modular education; and providing systematic information support for achieved results.
Members of the Expert Mining Council have supported Myaskov`s proposal and, as Vaisberg said, they have issued a mandate. Moreover, the experts have put forward a number of proposals on promising scientific topics.
Professor Georgy Krasnyansky, a scientific advisor at the NUST MISIS Interuniversity Center for Strategic Management and the Conjecture of Commodity Markets and the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the “Karakan-Invest” group of companies, suggested restructuring the Expert Mining Council so it can switch to a continuous mode of operation. He believes that the changes taking place in the College of Mining require a much greater presence of the Expert Mining Council, and meetings every six month are not enough.
To do this, it is necessary to form expert groups on the most promising research areas, such as natural-like mining technologies; robotic, intellectual, and unmanned extraction of minerals; polar-latitude natural resource development; industrial development of space objects; improvement of the regulatory framework in the field of subsoil management; design of civil & social objects in the underground space, and other noteworthy projects.
