More than 300 people from nine renowned European universities are taking part in the Unite! Dialogue, which started at the Wroclaw Tech on Tuesday. For three days, they will discuss and plan the development of further cooperation within the Unite!.

Unite! alliance was established in 2019 thanks to the European Commission's initiative to create a European Education Area by 2025 European Education Area. The European Education Area.

European Universities are consortia of universities in the Union that enable students to obtain degrees by combining studies in several EU countries and contribute to the international competitiveness of European universities.

"The Unite! currently consists of nine universities focused on the development of modern technologies. Our main goal is to develop a new system of university education, so we offer our students a range of interdisciplinary study programmes and many opportunities for international exchange." - says Prof Tanya Bruhl, president of Unite! and rector of Darmstadt University of Technology.

Initially, seven leading European universities were part of the Unite!: Aalto University (Finland), KTH Royal Institute of Technology (Sweden), Technical University of Darmstadt (Germany), Grenoble INP-UGA (France), Politecnico di Torino (Italy), Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya - Barcelona Tech (Spain), Universidade de Lisboa (Portugal). Last year, the Wrocław University of Science and Technology and the Technical University of Graz joined the network.

"When we were looking for a place for ourselves, we were primarily guided by the aims of the network and the level of the universities belonging to it. Unite! turned out to be an excellent group with universities highly ranked in Europe." explains Prof. Arkadiusz Wójs, rector of Wroclaw Tech. - In addition to technical universities, general universities also belong to it, because when educating young people we cannot close ourselves only to the world of engineering, he added.

In total, nearly 200,000 students study at universities associated in the Unite! network has nearly 200 000 students, and nearly 50 000 graduates each year. Members of the network cooperate closely on more than 80 projects, and more than 2,000 people have already benefited from student mobility opportunities.

For the first time in Wrocław

Unite! Dialogue is a key cyclical conference, open to all network members, organised by individual universities belonging to Unite! The meetings serve to raise the profile of Unite!, its vision and values among the community of member universities.

The 8th edition of the meeting is hosted by the Wrocław University of Science Technology and is held under the theme 'Unite!Ecosystems'. This is to emphasise the importance of cooperation and integration within the ecosystems of European universities.

In total, more than 300 lecturers, staff and students met in Wrocław. The four-day event aims to highlight the importance of cooperation and integration within the ecosystems of European universities. All this to further stimulate innovation, productivity and sustainability.

"Among other things, the conference discusses the development of teaching and research collaborations that could benefit students, PhD students and young researchers. Creating a common space in the Unite! network will allow us to join the larger world of science. This is very important, because today technical universities are required to solve big problems related, for example, to global warming, the development of medical technologies or green energy. This requires the involvement of scientists from different fields, and by having such a large family we can take on these challenges." - Prof Arkadiusz Wójs emphasised.

The conference programme includes cross-cutting and plenary sessions and meetings in several working groups. These will be devoted, among other things, to the E+ community or the Horizon Europe work packages.

Some of the participants already started their visit to Poland on 16 September. At that time, a special workshop was organised in Karpacz on possible cooperation between individual partners in Horizon Europe projects. During the three-day event, three communities were formed: energy transition, green transition and climate, to initiate cooperation in these areas.