A newly signed agreement for scientific cooperation and exchange between UNMC and Moscow State University formalizes a relationship that already has seen the universities’ faculty and students working together, especially in the areas of polymer science and nanotechnology.
“The major goal of the agreement is to find ways to interact that are meaningful to UNMC and important to Moscow State,” said Alexander “Sasha” Kabanov, Ph.D., D.Sc., Parke-Davis Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences in the UNMC College of Pharmacy. “We’ve had faculty and students who have collaborated for some time, and we needed this formal agreement to advance the relationship.”
Dr. Kabanov, an alumnus of Moscow State University, is UNMC’s scientific coordinator for the agreement, and as such, will serve as UNMC’s principal liaison with MSU. At UNMC, Dr. Kabanov is director of the Center for Drug Delivery and Nanomedicine that currently has 31 scientists who are researching new ways of disease diagnosis and treatment using nanomedicine, i.e., highly specific medical intervention at the molecular scale.
Dr. Kabanov has collaborated with scientists from his alma mater since coming to the UNMC College of Pharmacy in 1995. During the past decade, the two universities have published more than two dozen papers together, have filed several joint patents, and have had extensive visitor exchanges. Five undergraduate students from Moscow State have trained to date at UNMC through a National Science Foundation grant.
In February 2002, Dr. Kabanov taught a short course on polymers in drug delivery at Moscow State. He plans to teach another short course soon. He said the personal contact with potential students would facilitate recruiting them to UNMC.
“To extend our collaborations further will take personal contact,” Dr. Kabanov said.
Moscow State University, Dr. Kabanov said, is the best university in Russia.
“This is the school,” Dr. Kabanov said. “It has maintained its very high level of education, of student selection and of student achievement. The students at Moscow State University are of the highest quality.”
Dr. Kabanov also lauded the quality of the scientific coordinators from Moscow State University, Professor Alexander Zezin, in chemistry; Professor Alexey Khokhlov, in physics; and Professor Yuri Pirogov and Professor Renad Sagdeev, in the Educational and Research Center for Magnetic Tomography and Spectroscopy, who are internationally renowned scientists.