The session was held on June 19th featuring Ilshat Gafurov as a key speaker.
The report delivered by the rector touched on recent history of the university, i.e. the convergence of several educational institutions into Kazan Federal University, along with the problems caused by such development. From one side, the amount of students, staff, total area of research facilities and labs have increased, whereas publishing activity and citation indices have significantly fallen.
Endowments from grants given by the Russian Government, Project 5-100 and the PHARMA-2020 program gave KFU the opportunity to create 150 world class labs for priority areas: advanced materials, biomedicine and pharmaceutics, oil production, oil refining and petrochemistry, IT and space research. In addition, there are centers of excellence, established to cooperate with international corporations and to invite the world's leading scientists; and Open labs, which is KFU's own approach to attract prospective as well as experienced researchers.
Most importantly, due to restructuring the University has already started achieving results. Firstly, Kazan Federal rose by 50 points in the QS World University Rankings, where as in QS BRICS it went up from 79th to 69th position. Overall, KFU was assigned 3 QS stars.
Subject rankings of Russian universities shows that KFU remains:
As was concluded by Grigorii Andruschak, Director of the Department for Strategy, Analysis and Forecast of Russian Ministry of Education and Science, KFU stands out from other 5-100 schools with its commitment to structural changes, active collaboration with partners and investors, interdisciplinary research and partnership spirit.