To Student's Day

Personnel forge for JINR

In December of this year, the Dubna State University solemnly celebrated the 20th anniversary of two basic departments of JINR - Department of Nuclear Physics and Department of Fundamental Problems of Microworld Physics.

And today, at these departments, students receive an education that meets international standards. During their studies, students are extensively involved in research and are given the opportunity to do internships in JINR laboratories, where most students continue to work after graduation.

Today, Dubna University is an educational institution with a thirty-year history and one of the leading universities in Russia with its own traditions and unique educational programmes. One of the initiators of the establishment of the university in 1994 was the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, where the topic of obtaining knowledge has always been given the utmost importance. Largely thanks to the teachers from JINR that have shown great diligence, involvement and concern all these years, today, university graduates demonstrate excellent results in science.

Currently, the university has two faculties (Faculty of Natural Sciences and Engineering, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities), two institutes (Institute of System Analysis and Control, Engineering Physics Institute), a college and four branches in Dmitrov, Lytkarino, Protvino and Kotelniki. Students are trained in more than 120 areas. Every year, more than a thousand specialists graduate from the university.

Two JINR basic departments were opened at the University in 2003. Educational programmes for them were developed by leading scientists of the United Institute and it was not easy - to develop a programme from scratch that meets international standards. Initially, the drivers of this project were Yuri Oganessian and Alexey Sissakyan. They headed new departments and constantly kept their finger on the pulse, developing this area at the university, instilling in young people an interest and love for physics. In Dubna, they started to consistently train physicists for the first time.

"We have a unique opportunity to create conditions where a leading scientific specialist that daily seeks answers to the fundamental mysteries of the Universe, having made a discovery, could almost immediately tell university students about it," Acting Rector of the Dubna State University, Head of the Group of Theoretical and Computational Physics of FLNR Andrey Denikin says. "And from the very first year, students have a chance to see, to touch and afterwards, to join real, serious, very deep fundamental science at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research."

Over 20 years, 15 generations of students, that's 234 people, have graduated from the department and 90 specialists with double diplomas from universities in Kazakhstan have been trained. More than half of the graduates have stayed to work in Dubna.

"The development of the Department of Nuclear Physics and the Department of Theoretical Physics (currently, the Department of Fundamental Problems of Microworld Physics - author's note) was expected, as the establishment of the university itself in Dubna had been," Acting Vice-Rector for Research and Innovation at Dubna University, Head of the Group of Organic Scintillation Detectors at DLNP Igor Nemchenok notes. "Heads of departments, outstanding scientists and organizers of science Yuri Oganessian and Alexey Sisakyan set the pace and scale that allow today's graduates of the department to achieve the success that we see. Some of the graduates of these fairly young departments are already candidates of science. There is no other department at the university that comes close to these indicators. And this is no coincidence: what students of the Department of Nuclear Physics and the Department of Fundamental Problems of Microworld Physics learn is extremely interesting, it's all about the world around us, it's all about the Universe, of which you and I are particles."

"Initially, we tried to prepare the educational programme so that graduates would join the ranks of researchers at the Joint Institute. And about 65% of graduates stayed in Dubna," Deputy Head of the Department of Nuclear Physics, Scientific Secretary of FLNR Alexander Karpov emphasizes. "Of these, about half of the total number consists of JINR employees. This is a pretty good indicator. Many of them have defended their dissertations - about 10%. I can say that in JINR laboratories, university graduates are visible, they occupy good positions, they are well-known, their work is valued and has great prospects. This suggests that the level of training is sufficient to work at the very cutting edge of science."

The distribution map of graduates from these two departments will cover half the world: they work in leading scientific and educational organizations in many countries. Many of them, already in their senior years, participate in joint experiments implemented in research centres in Europe, North America and Japan. This close collaboration is preserved during their subsequent graduate studies. But most of the graduates, of course, have stayed in Dubna, at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, still develop science and make discoveries. And they are all in love with their work.

Ksenia MORUNOVA
Based on the information from the press office of the Dubna University