A ceremony was held on January 24 at the opening of the "Modern Veterinary Pharmaceutics" joint scientific and educational center by VIC and K.I. Skryabin Moscow Veterinary Academy
The ceremony was attended by Maria Novikova, director of the Veterinary Department of the Russian Ministry of Agriculture, Nikita Lebedev, advisor to the head of the Federal Veterinary and Phytosanitary Monitoring Service, Sergei Poziabin, rector of the K. I. Skryabin Moscow Veterinary Academy, and Sergei Kaspariants, Executive Director of VIC Group.
At the conference "Development Trends and Human Resources in the Russian Veterinary and Biopharmaceutical Industry" timed to the event, Maria Novikova noted that the opening of a joint scientific and educational center of VIC Group and Skryabin Moscow Veterinary Academy represented the right vector, since science, education and industry should work in close cooperation. "Specialists will be trained in new applied knowledge thanks to drug manufacturers, and enterprises will get really high quality specialists," added the director of the Science and Technology Policy and Education Department of the Russian Ministry of Agriculture.
Rector of the K. I. Skryabin Moscow Veterinary Academy Sergey Poziabin said that the Academy targeted its development towards interaction with employers and scientific institutions. The first scientific and educational center is opening together with VIC Group because it is necessary to learn from the leaders of the industry, from those who can teach. The main task of this platform (which idea was generated by Russian Deputy Minister of Agriculture Maxim Uvaidov) is to attract the best practitioners to the Academy so that the graduates have the expertise necessary to work at modern enterprises.
Among the strategic challenges facing veterinary education, Sergey Poziabin named the following:
- Rethinking curricula and training programs in order to switch from using foreign non-reproducible methods of prevention and diagnosis to the graduates' ability to work with domestic equipment,
- Transfer of the specialty "36.05.01 Veterinary" in the third price group,
- Move away from copying international education programs to create a domestic training system and create a system of lifelong learning.
Executive Director of VIC Group Sergey Kaspariants emphasized that isolation from the knowledge flow and nourishment of science from abroad is actually a good thing, as it is a certain challenge the industry has met. "We've had three years to prepare for this since the pandemic began. Now our specialists know how to work with the materials that are on the market ... they have accumulated experience, cutting-edge expertise, they can write research papers of international level. Even five or seven years ago, visiting companies in Europe, they could learn something. But over the past four years Russian pig farms and poultry farms have become better equipped and more ambitious, and livestock has been completely transformed into what it is today, so the level of our specialists is now much higher," - said Sergey Kaspariants. One of the tasks set out by the Executive Director for the company, the Ministry of Agriculture of the Russian Federation and K.I. Skryabin Moscow Veterinary Academy is to raise the prestige of the profession in order to remove the bias towards veterinarians for companion animals with a huge deficit of specialists in veterinary medicine for agriculture.
The Scientific and Practical Conference " Development and Human Resourcing of Russian Veterinary and Biopharmaceutical Industry" was also addressed by Yuri Barsukov, Director of FGBU Veterinary Center, President of Vetbioprom Association, Nikita Lebedev, Adviser to Head of the Federal Veterinary and Phytosanitary Monitoring Service, Irina Donnik, RAS Academician, Assistant to President of Kurchatov Institute, Director of L.K. Ernst Federal Research Center for Animal Husbandry.
Goals and objectives of the scientific and educational center "Modern veterinary pharmaceutics":
- To create an opportunity for academy students to receive cutting-edge know-how from the best manufacturers of veterinary medicines;
- To provide training, master-classes, lectures by the leading specialists in the cattle-breeding and poultry-breeding spheres;
- To arrange internship in the real sector of the economy;
- To generate new ideas and implement startup projects;
- To increase grant support for students in the form of personal scholarships;
- To ensure the employment of graduates at the best enterprises of the industry.