TEHRAN - Mohammad Moqimi, the president of the University of Tehran, and Viktor Sadovnichy, the rector of the Lomonosov Moscow State University discussed ways to expand bilateral relations.

In a meeting that was held at the Sixth Forum of Rectors of Russian and Iranian Universities on April 27, the two sides announced readiness to exchange professors and students and boost joint research programs, IRNA reported.

One step to expand the cooperation between the two universities is that Persian-speaking students of Moscow University and Russian-speaking students of Tehran University can be guests at each other's universities for at least one semester, Moqimi suggested.

The president of Lomonosov Moscow University welcomed the proposal of the president of Tehran University.

Moqimi expressed hope that the cooperation program will start within the next few months.

The Sixth Forum of Rectors of Russian and Iranian Universities was organized in order to expand and deepen international cooperation in scientific, research, and academic fields between the top universities of the two countries.

In August 2022, Mohammad Javad Salmanpour, the deputy head of the Organization for Student Affairs, and Dmitry Kalinichenko, head of the Russian Federal Agency for the Commonwealth of Independent States Affairs, Compatriots Living Abroad, and the International Humanitarian Cooperation, met in Tehran.

During the meeting, Kalinichenko noted that there are 300 Iranian students with scholarships in Russia and that the number can increase in the future.

Salmanpour, for his part, said that most of the Russian students in Iran are studying without a scholarship mostly in the fields of Persian language and literature, linguistics, etc., and the Islamic Republic welcomes the increasing number of foreign students in these fields.

Iran is among the 15 successful countries in attracting international students, according to Salmanpour.

We have the ability and capacity to have more than 250,000 foreign students by 2026, he stated.

According to unofficial statistics, more than 300,000 Iranian students study abroad.

Russia is one of the prioritized countries for scientific and technological relations with Iran. Since 2016, various specialized working groups formed by the two countries in the fields of space, aerospace, cognitive sciences, biotechnology, nanotechnology, university cooperation, mega-science, information technology, energy, and regional cooperation.

During the last 5-6 years, the capacity of international interactions has been considered by Iran and Russia, and this cooperation has expanded by forming bilateral agreements through inter-sectoral coordination.

Reviewing the status of universities worldwide shows that the number of Iranian universities has increased in nearly all subject rankings.

At the beginning of its formation, rating systems provided a comprehensive view of institutions and evaluated them from all aspects and as a whole. But in the past few years, many of these systems evaluate and rank institutions in various scientific fields.

This new ranking method has emerged to meet the needs of users who seek to know the position of an institution in a special field.

Some of these systems evaluate broad scientific fields such as humanities and social sciences, technical and engineering, and medicine, and others measure special fields such as chemistry, mathematics, artificial intelligence, anthropology, and nursing in institutions.

A total of 94,406 foreign students from 91 countries are studying in Iranian universities, according to statistics released in the Iranian year 1400 (March 2021-March 2022).

One of the policies of the Ministry of Science, Research and Technology is to try to promote diversity in the admission of international students, ILNA quoted deputy science minister Hashem Dadashpour as saying.

In other words, "admitting from all countries and sending only to top universities," he added.

“We are determined and try to admit students from all nationalities, although, in line with the goals and strategic policies of higher education, we have priority over the countries of origin for admitting students.”

“Now we have students from 91 nationalities in the country's universities, some of them are from European and American countries,” Dadashpour said.

MG