The Minister of the Environment, Waters and Forests, Mircea Fechet, visited on Wednesday, February 7, 2024, the Institute for Advanced Environmental Research - ICAM, within the Western University of Timișoara and signed, together with the Rector of UVT, prof. Dr. Marilen Gabriel Pirtea, two agreements for student practice and inter-institutional cooperation.
The first of these, the "Framework collaboration agreement regarding the implementation of internships within undergraduate and master's university study programs", provides solutions for the partnership organization of internships through which UVT students will be initiated in the application of specialized theoretical knowledge . The declared purpose of these internships is to consolidate and capitalize on the theoretical knowledge received by practitioners during the training process, but also to train the necessary skills to apply what they have accumulated during the theoretical training period, in accordance with the specifics of the specialization for which they are preparing .
The second agreed document is a "Collaboration Protocol" through which a coherent manner of inter-institutional cooperation was established between the Ministry of Environment, Water and Forests and the West University of Timișoara, regarding activities carried out for professional training in public administration in the field climate change, but also for the development of public policies based on scientific evidence in the field of the environment, respectively collaboration in the research fields arising from the needs of MMAP.
Minister Mircea Fechet declared: "The institutional protocol that we establish today for cooperation with the Western University of Timișoara is part of the set of tools that the Government of Romania and the Ministry of the Environment, Waters and Forests rely on for the development of advanced environmental research. Within the decision-making practices of the European Union, the documentation accompanying the legislative acts is made available to the decision-making institutions through research projects, through the results of scientific studies of thousands of pages. Our collaboration with universities and environmental research institutes will lead to welcome competition between institutes and research teams for competitiveness and efficiency. Congratulations to the ICAM team, I am glad to be here today, at UVT, and I hope that, beyond the signing of agreements, our collaboration will bring concrete results for the environment and for Romania. Thank you for managing to put not only Timișoara, but also Romania, on the select map of places where research is really done."
The rector of UVT, Marilen Gabriel Pirtea, said: "ICAM – UVT aims to become a significant landmark on the map of the European Education and Research Area. We thank Minister Mircea Fechet and his team for giving us all the confidence to open the practical ways of institutional collaboration, both for student internships and for cooperation in environmental studies. The UVT Institute for Advanced Environmental Research (ICAM), recently inaugurated, has already formed its first nucleus of thirty researchers, equipped its laboratories with new generation equipment and started prospecting the directions of studies in which it will invest its energies, including environmental protection studies. The partnership established today with the Ministry of the Environment, Waters and Forests gives us ambition and motivates us, in a global project to structure research projects synchronized with the opportunities opened up by the initiatives of the European Union."
