New Syngenta-UPC Chair on innovation and good practices in plant health
The company’s Chair will boost transversal training at the university, PhD scholarships, cooperation agreements and awards for end-of-degree projects.
By Biocat
Rector of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya-BarcelonaTech (UPC) Antoni Giró and General Manager of agricultural multinational Syngenta Iberia Sergio Dedominici, on 11 July in Castelldefels (Barcelona), agreed to create a new company Chair called the Syngenta-UPC Chair for Innovation and Improvement in Good Practices in Plant Health. It is structured around training, research, knowledge transfer and dissemination of research activity in plant health.
This agreement consolidates collaboration between the UPC and Syngenta that, mainly through the School of Agricultural Engineering of Barcelona (ESAB), boosts R&D&i and the transfer of technology results to improve crop quality. The Chair based at the ESAB in Castelldefels will focus on training, both through the university’s educational programs (elective courses, postgraduate degrees, master’s degrees, etc.) and Syngenta’s training plans. It will also promote pre- and post-doctoral scholarships, cooperation agreements and awards for end-of-degree projects, while also fostering research in Catalonia through joint projects, the promotion of PhD dissertations and meetings among experts.
The Chair is significant because it will bring value added to research results that will be transferred through patents and their application on the market, making them public in the media or at debates in dissemination events.
Syngenta is a Swiss multinational corporation with a subsidiary in Barcelona and a leader in the development of technology and solutions for the agricultural sector. It has more than 27,000 workers in some 90 countries. In 2012, the company participated in the project led by the Center for Research in Agricultural Genomics (CRAG) to obtain the melon genome.
This Chair joins the other twenty the UPC currently has, noteworthy among which are the ones on sustainability and waste management and the SEAT Chair on sustainable vehicles. The Syngenta-UPC Chair, however, is the first to focus on the biotechnology arena.
More information is available on the UPC website.