Eindhoven University of Technology

The fully electric Formula Student car developed and built by 60 students of the Eindhoven University of Technology

On 3 January 2011, the university's strategic vision document for the period up to 2020, the "Strategic Plan 2020", was presented.[7] Despite the economic crisis and the budget cutbacks announced by the Dutch government for the period up to 2014, the university set itself an ambitious strategic vision for the period up to 2020. This vision included establishing a University College to foster both depth, breadth, and societal relevance in engineering education; establishing a combined Graduate School to manage the graduate programs; an increase of the student body by 50 percent; a 50 percent increase in the number of annual PhDs awarded; an increase of knowledge "valorisation" (exploitation by industry and society) to a campus-wide score of 4.2; increasing the international position of the university to within the top-100 universities; and increasing the embedding of the university within the city and the Brainport region by transforming the campus into a high-grade science park with laboratories, housing facilities for 700 students and researchers and supporting facilities. The science park was one of the more costly elements of the plan.[8]

The day-to-day running of the university is in the hands of the Executive College (Dutch: College van Bestuur). The College provides oversight for the departments, the service organizations and the Innovation Lab, plus the local activities of the Stan Ackermans Institute. The College consists of three people, plus a secretary:

The president

The president is the chair of the College and the main face of the university to the outside world. Over the last few years the post has been held by people from outside the university, chosen from high levels of industry, in order to strengthen the ties between the university and industrial partners. The current president is Robert-Jan Smits, the former Director-General of Research and Innovation at the European Commission.

The rector magnificus

The rector magnificus is the one member of the College whose membership is mandated by law. The law allows the university to appoint a rector in any way, but the university statutes determine that the rector magnificus must be an active professor at the university (and must have been that before being appointed rector); in practice the rector is always a former department dean. The rector is the voice of the academic staff in the College and guards the academic interests of the university in the College. The current rector magnificus is Frank Baaijens.

The vice president

The third member is a "tie-breaker" member of the College. The post is open to anybody (but generally not filled by an academic staff member). The current vice president is Nicole Ummelen.

The secretary

The secretary is not a member of the College but a university functionary who does secretarial work for the College, keeping the minutes and the records and taking care of communication between the College and the university. The College secretary is usually the secretary for the entire university. The current secretary is Susanne van Weelden.

There are two bodies that provide oversight over the Executive College:

• The Oversight Board is an external board of five people appointed by the Minister of Education (one member is appointed at the suggestion of the University Council). The Board provides external oversight of the running of the university, including changing of the statutes, the budget and other management decisions.
• The University Council is a council of 18 people, half of whom are elected from the university staff (academic and otherwise) and half from the student body. The University Council is informed of the running of the university by the College at least twice a year and may advise the College as it sees fit. It guards against discrimination within the university. And the council must agree to changes in the management structure. The Council membership is open to all students and personnel, except those persons who are in the Oversight Board, the Executive College or who are the University Secretary.

Most of the work at the university is done in the departments and the service organizations.

• The departments take care of most of the research and education at the university; each one is run by its professors, headed by the dean. The deans are all members of the executive deliberation meeting, which is a regular meeting of the deans and the rector.
• The service organizations provide services to the inhabitants of the university campus. Examples of these organizations include the housing organization, the ICT organization and the Communication Expertise Center (which does external communications, including to the press). Each service organization is headed by an organization head.

Both for the departments and the service organizations, the staff (and students) are involved with the running of the body. For that reason both types of bodies have advisory councils which have advisory and co-decision authorities.

Over the past two decades, the TU/e has increasingly developed commercial interests and off-campus ties. These include commercial agreements and contracts directly between the university and external companies, but also interests in spinoff companies. In order to manage these kinds of contractual obligations the university started the TU/e Holding B.V. in 1997. The Holding is a limited company, dedicated to the commercial exploitation of scientific knowledge.[10]

The scientific departments (or faculties; Dutch: faculteiten) are the primary vehicles for teaching and research in the university. They employ the majority of the academic staff, are responsible for teaching and sponsor the research schools and institutions.

The departments also offer Ph.D programs (Dutch: promotiefase) whereby a qualified master may earn a Ph.D. Unlike in anglo-saxon countries these are not educational programs, however; rather, a person working towards obtaining the Ph.D is a research employee of the university.

Area View of TU Eindhoven from a hot air ballon

The TU/e has nine departments:

• Biomedical Engineering
• Built Environment
• Electrical Engineering
• Industrial Design
• Chemical Engineering and Chemistry
• Industrial Engineering & Innovation Sciences (formerly Technology Management)
• Applied Physics
• Mechanical Engineering
• Mathematics and Computer Science

The university offers honors programs aimed at both bachelor and master students. At the bachelor level it consists of intensive study within eight possible areas or tracks. At the master level it consists of personal leadership and professional development components, over and above the normal masters study.[11]

In 1986, the university started a number of programs for a postgraduate doctorate of engineering (PDEng) together with two other Dutch technological universities (TU Delft and University of Twente). These programs are managed by the Stan Ackermans Institute on behalf of the 4TU Federation.[12] Each program is two years in length. Ten programs are available at the TU/e.[13]

• TU/e PDEng programs:
  • Automotive Systems Design
  • Clinical Informatics
  • Data Science
  • Healthcare Systems Design
  • Information and Communication Technology
  • Process and Product Design
  • Qualified Medical Engineer
  • Smart Buildings and Cities
  • Software Technology
  • User-System Interaction

Nationally, more than 3,500 students have earned the postgraduate PDEng degree through this program. On February 13, Ravi Thakkar was awarded 3000th PDEng diploma at TU/e

The university hosts a number of other educational programs that are in some way related to the main educational programs. These include the teacher's program and an MBA program.

• Eindhoven School of Education: Teacher's education for masters, to get their higher education teaching certificate. Also does research into educational sciences and innovation in education.
• TIAS School for Business and Society: A shared MBA program with the University of Tilburg, for university graduates.
• HBO minor program: Bachelor programs for students of HBO universities (four-year bachelor programs), to allow them access to university master programs.

The TU/e is among the world’s ten best-performing research universities in terms of research cooperation with industry in 2011 (Number 1 in 2009). Ten to 20 percent of the scientific publications of these ten universities in the period 2006–2008 were the result of partnerships with researchers in industry. As well as TU/e and Delft University of Technology, the top 10 also includes two universities in Japan (Tokyo Institute of Technology and Keio University in Tokyo), two in Sweden (CTH Chalmers University of Technology and KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm), and one each in Denmark (DTU Technical University of Denmark in Lyngby), Finland (University of Helsinki), Norway (Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim) and the USA (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York).[14]

The TU/e is enormously important to the economy of the Eindhoven region, as well as the wider areas of BrabantStad and the Samenwerkingsverband Regio Eindhoven. It provides highly skilled labor for the local knowledge economy and is a knowledge and research partner for technology companies in the area.

The historic basis for the university's role as an economy and research motor was the interaction with Philips. The university was founded primarily to address the need of Philips for local personnel with academic levels of education in electronics, physics, chemistry and later computer science. Later that interest spread to DAF and Royal Dutch Shell (which became the primary employer for graduates of the chemistry department). There was also a synergy with these companies in that senior personnel were hired from them to form the academic staff of the university (which led to the Eindhoven joke that the university trains the engineers and Philips trains the professors).

Changing economic times and business strategies changed the relationship during the 1980s and 1990s. As Philips started moving away from the region, its importance to the region and the university decreased. A struggle for economic survival forced the university to seek closer ties with the city and region of Eindhoven in the 1989–1995 period, resulting in the creation of the Brainport initiative to draw high tech business and industry to the region. The university started expending more effort in knowledge valorisation, in incubating technology startups, in providing direct knowledge support for local technology companies. Also the academic interests of the research shifted with the times, with more effort going into energy efficiency research, green technologies, and other areas of interest driven by social relevance (the call for better technology in the medical field, for example, led to cooperation with the Catharina Hospital and the University of Maastricht medical department and finally the creation of the Biomedical Technology department).

The TU/e is host (and in some cases also commissioner) of a number of highly successful research schools, including the ESI and the DPI. These research institutes are a source of high-tech knowledge for high-tech companies in the area, such as ASML, NXP and FEI. The university also plays a large role as knowledge and personnel supplier to other companies in the High Tech Campus Eindhoven and helps incubate startups through the Eindhoven Twinning Center. It is also a knowledge supporter of the automotive industry in the Helmond region.

In the extended region, the TU/e is part of the backbone of the Eindhoven-Leuven-Aachen triangle.[15] This economic cooperation agreement between three cities in three countries has created one of the most innovative regions in the European Union (measured in terms of money invested in technology and knowledge economy); the agreement is based on the cooperative triangle that connects the three technical universities in those cities.

As of the summer of 2010, the TU/e is host to the Eindhoven Energy Institute (EEI). The EEI is a virtual research institute (meaning that it doesn't have any actual offices or facilities), which manages and coordinates the activities of a large number of groups and subinstitutes in the general area of sustainable and alternative energy technologies.[16]

The scientific director of the institute is prof.dr.ir. David Smeulders. He is pro forma head of the research department, which is split into four key areas: Built Environment (energy usage and patterns in building, headed by prof.dr.ir. Jan Hensen from the Department of the Built Environment), Future Fuels (headed by prof.dr. Philip de Goey of Mechanical Engineering), Energy Conversion (headed by prof.dr.ir. René Janssen from Chemical Engineering) and Fusion and Plasma (headed by prof.dr. Niek Lopes Cardozo from Physics). The EEI also incorporates the Graduate School on Sustainable Energy, which the TU/e had already established together with the TU Munich and DTU Lyngby. Secretarial services will be provided by the Center Technology for Sustainable Development (TDO) which also already existed at the TU/e (since 1994).[17]

Energy research at the TU/e is among the best in academic Europe (a February 2010 study by Reed Elsevier puts it second only to Imperial College London).[18] This fact, as well as the unique attention to energy in the built-up environment, drew the attention of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology. The EEI is now a full co-location of EIT's KIC on Sustainable Energy (InnoEnergy).[16]

The TU/e maintains active academic cooperation with sister institutions in many different countries, for example:[19][20]

• National University of Singapore, Singapore
• Zhejiang University, China
• Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China
• Fudan University, China
• Northeastern University (China), China
• International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore, India
• International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad, India
• Manipal Academy of Higher Education, India
• Georgia Institute of Technology, US
• Northwestern University, US
• Carnegie Mellon University, US
• RMIT University, Australia
• Middle East Technical University, Turkey
• Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium

The TU/e also provides education to an increasing number of foreign students and graduates. According to the 2009 annual report[21] in the academic year 2008–2009 there were 490 exchange students, 103 foreign nationals registered in a bachelor program, 430 in a master program, 158 in a professional doctorate program (79% of the total). In 2009 the university employed 37 foreign professors (15.9% of the total) and 16 foreign associate professors (12.8%). Overall, 29.5% of the university staff was non-Dutch.

In 2011/2012, the TU/e has Erasmus bilateral agreements with many universities in 30 countries across Europe in a diverse range of subjects for student exchange.[22]

In addition to the "regular" types of sports practiced among the student body and by the staff, the TU/e collaborates with the student body in a number of "technology sporting efforts". These usually take the form of cross-department projects, which makes them multidisciplinary efforts. Some examples include:

Robot football

In 2010 TechUnited, the university's robot football team, won the European Championship,[23] came second for the third time in a row at the world championship in Singapore and finally won the world championship in 2012.[24][25] The team is part of the Mid-Size league of RoboCup.

Auto racing

The TU/e hosts and sponsors a student race team, University Racing Eindhoven (URE). This team competes annually in the Formula Student and other races with self-built racers. Starting in 2010 the team switched from a petrol engine to an electric car; this car came third at Silverstone, second at Hockenheim and won the Formula Student in its first year.[26]

The university also hosts and sponsors a student race team, Solar Team Eindhoven (STE), that enters cars named Stella into the biannual World Solar Challenge since 2013, winning the Cruiser class competition both in 2013 and 2015.[27][28] Another student racing initiative is the Automotive Technology InMotion team, a collaboration between the TU/e and Fontys University of Applied Sciences. The team has the aim to compete in the 2020 24 Hours of Le Mans.

TU Eindhoven has over 110 community bodies that members of TU may participate in.[29] They are related to sports, culture, faith, staff, international students and hobbies, as well as university political parties, student teams, and study associations for each faculty.[29]

Currently TU/e has various accredited student teams which address challenges in the fields of sustainability, artificial intelligence, health and mobility.[30]

• prof. dr. ir.René de Borst: Spinozapremie (1999)[31]
• prof. dr. Bert Meijer: KNCV Gold Medal (1993), Arthur K. Doolittle Award (1995), Spinozapremie (2001),[32] Wheland Medal 2010/2011[33]
• prof.dr.ir. René Janssen: KIvI/NIRIA Speurwerkprijs 2010, Spinozapremie (2015)[34]
• prof. dr.ir. Jaap Schouten: Simon Stevin Master 2006[35]