H-BRS welcomes guests from the UTFPR in Brazil

As part of the TOFI lighthouse project, Prof. Dr Jean Patric Da Costa, Professor and Head of the Innovation Centre, and Prof. Dr Emerson Giovani Carati, Head of the Institute for Research and Master's Programmes, visited H-BRS. The visit was organised primarily by the IWK department and the university's International Office.

For six days, the guests visited various laboratories and institutions in the IWK department and exchanged ideas with H-BRS researchers and employees. The programme included a workshop with the ZiEL Institute on didactics and a visit to the BRS Motorsport Team. There were also meetings to finalise the planned H-BRS delegation visit to Brazil. The second part of the visit was organised at the research partner Fraunhofer Institute for Energy Economics and Energy System Technology in Kassel in order to gain further insights into research and exchange.

The visit by Prof. Dr Jean Patric da Costa and Prof. Dr Emerson Giovani Carati is integrated into the DAAD project "TOFI - Take-Off4Internationalisation". The aim is to deepen existing cooperation with international partners in the faculty and extend it to more departments. In this way, the university would like to position itself better and more strategically internationally in the future.

During the two weeks, four different points of cooperation were defined for the IWK faculty, which are to be discussed further and implemented in the coming period:

1. At an administrative level, the cooperation agreement between the universities is to be extended to other areas and made more general in order to facilitate broad-based cooperation.
2. In the area of teaching, a further joint course is to be established. In addition, the IWK department would like to develop a binational Master's degree programme in electrical engineering.
3. In the area of research, the exchange will initially be consolidated through the co-supervision of theses and doctoral students.  The basic aim is to conduct joint research on new topics via research projects.
4. International exchange is to be promoted in the area of mobility. The H-BRS is currently making a return visit to Brazil to further discuss the opportunities for cooperation between the two universities.

History of the collaboration

The collaboration was initiated in 2020 between Prof Dr Marco Jung and Prof Dr Jean Patric Da Costa and began in 2020 with Jean Patric Da Costa's guest professorship. As a guest lecturer, he taught in the winter semester 2020/2021 and in the summer semester 2021 in the Master's degree programmes in Electrical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering as well as in the Bachelor's degree programme in Sustainable Engineering (see link to german article).

Since then, the IWK department has been running a hybrid Bachelor's module under the motto "One Course, Two Countries", in which Brazilian and German students can participate and work together on projects.

Since October, the H-BRS has also had a student from the UTFPR working in Marco Jung's research group as part of an internship.

The UTFPR and the Campus Pato Branco 

The UTFPR is the largest technical university in Brazil and is spread across 13 cities in the state of Paraná. At Campus Pato Branco alone, 3000+ students are enrolled and a further 300 employees, doctoral students, etc. are employed. The location specialises in engineering, applied natural sciences and agriculture.