Ural Federal University

USTU (UPI)

USU

The Ural University was established in the town of Ekaterinburg in 1920 by the decree of the head of Soviet revolutionary government Vladimir Lenin. However, the newly-born university underwent a number of changes due to the lack of resources in such circumstances as revolution and civil war. Finally, the university split into two: Ural State University (USU), a smaller university responsible for education in natural sciences, social sciences and humanities, and Ural Polytechnic Institute (USTU-UPI), a larger one which was focused on training engineers in areas such as metallurgy, machine-building, civil engineering and power engineering. At the same time, UPI was developing several new (for the time) areas of knowledge like nuclear energetics, organic chemistry and synthesis, and telecommunications.

Despite such partition, both universities were connected closely with each other, as well as with their partners from the region’s industrial economy. Due to this fact, Ekaterinburg became one of the largest university cities of Russia. Since 2008, when a massive reorganization of Russian university system was launched, a number of universities in different cities of the country, which already had close relations, have received special federal status and additional funding. Federal universities were established in Rostov-na-Donu, Krasnoyarsk, Kazan, Archangelsk, Yakutsk, Kaliningrad, Vladivostok and Ekaterinburg. These federal universities are the leaders of the Russian educational system. The merger process of USTU-UPI and USU to create Ural Federal University (UrFU) began in 2009 and was fully completed by the spring of 2011.

During almost 100 years of its history, the Ural University has produced more than 360,000 graduates, many of whom achieved significant success in research, culture, and politics. One of the most famous graduates of the university is the first President of Russia, Boris Yeltsin, whose name the university bears nowadays.

In accordance with the Federal Law of 03.11.2006 № 174-FZ "About autonomous institutions", a supervisory board was created in UrFU. As of March 2019, it consists of:[12]

• Dmitry Pumpyansky, Chairman of the UrFU Supervisory Board, President of the Sverdlovsk Oblast Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, Chairman of the Board of Directors of OAO TMK
• Marina Borovskaya, Deputy Minister of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation
• Valery Charushin, Chairman of the Presidium of the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences
• Arkady Chernetsky, Member of the Federation Council of Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation
• Andrey Kozitsyn, Director General of the UMMC-Holding
• Evgeny Kuyvashev, Governor of the Sverdlovsk Oblast
• Yaroslav Kuzminov, Rector of the National Research University – Higher School of Economics
• Igor Manzhurov, Head of the Ural Regional Office of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation
• Dmitry Peskov, Director of "Young Professionals" sector at the autonomous non-profit organization "Agency for Strategic Initiatives for New Projects Promotion"
• Aleksandr Povalko, Director General of the Russian Venture Company
• Tatyana Yumasheva, Director of the Сharitable foundation of the first President of Russia Boris Yeltsin.

Ural Federal University is one of Russia's biggest research and educational centers. The number of full-time students studying at UrFU exceeds 35,000 (March 2019). They come from 75 countries of the world, and are taught by more than 4,200 faculty members. 424 educational programs are provided by 13 institutes and include courses in natural sciences, engineering, social sciences, humanities, economics and management. More than 360,000 people have graduated from Ural Federal University over the years. Since 2008, the university has been bearing the name of Boris Yeltsin – graduate of 1955, who was elected first President of independent Russia in 1991.

During an academic year, the university is attended by more than 20 international delegations. Among them – ambassadors of the US, France, United Kingdom, Sweden, The Republic of South Africa, Mongolia and others.

The first international students arrived at Ural University in the 1940s. During almost 100 years of the university’s history, it has produced more than 2,500 specialists from Europe, Asia and Africa. As of March 2019, about 3,100 international students are studying at UrFU.

The sports facilities of UrFU allow more than 30 teams to train and compete. University is host to several popular festivals, among which are one of the oldest student festivals of Russia, “Vesna UPI” (literally, “The Ural Polytechnic Spring”), which goes back to 1956, and the Vienna Music Film Festival.

One more important direction of activity is integration of Ural Federal University into the international research and educational environment. The university participates in network educational projects (Shanghai Cooperation Organization, European Union, UNESCO, BRICS). UrFU is a key partner in the Ural region for foreign universities, international organizations, foreign companies and corporations. The number of foreign students, postgraduates, researches and lecturers is constantly growing. Within framework agreements, UrFU works with the market leaders in Russia and other countries.

UrFU scientist Victor Grohovsky talks to press during presentation of Chebarkul meteorite samples analysis

Key areas of scientific research at UrFU:

• Physics and astronomy: the condensed matter physics, physics of magnetic materials, optics and laser physics, radio physics, electronics, acoustics, quantum theory of solids; spectroscopy of activated crystals, fundamental studies of properties of materials under extreme conditions, the physics of low-temperature and nonideal plasma and its use in power engineering and clean technologies; theoretical and experimental thermal physics, physical gas-kinetics and surface physics, physico-chemical mechanics of heterogeneous and multiphase media, stellar astronomy.
• Power engineering: development of scientific principles of energy policy and mechanisms for its realization under market economy conditions, the fundamental problem of creating a safe and clean energy (including nuclear and fusion energy), non-conventional energy conversion processes, the fundamental problems of energy conservation and fuel efficiency.
• Metallurgy: the development of resource-saving and environmentally friendly processes of complex processing of ores and its wastes, the creation of new metallic materials with the desired properties.
• Сommunication technologies: integrated information and telecommunications networks and systems, the mathematical theory of pattern recognition.
• Mathematics and Mechanics: the theory of control and differential games, theory of algebraic systems and its applications to computer systems, the theory of functions and operators, the fundamental problem of construction of systems of automatic designing, mathematical methods of research of nonlinear control systems and processes, mathematical modeling in medicine.
• Chemistry and Materials Science: Theory of chemical bonding, kinetics and mechanisms of chemical reactions, solid state chemistry, chemistry of radioactive elements, physico-chemistry of polymers, the development of methods for the directed synthesis of complex organic molecules in order to obtain physiologically active substances with a selective effect, the development of the fundamentals of catalysis and the creation of highly efficient and selective heterogeneous, homogeneous and enzymatic catalysts and catalytic systems, the creation of chemical current sources, the creation of structural ceramics and silicate materials with sufficient ductility on the basis of oxides, nitrides, carbides, oxycarbonitrides.
• Biology: population and evolutionary ecology, animal ecology, environmental forecasting and assessment, plant physiology and studies of photosynthesis, industrial botany, ornithology.
• Philosophy and sociology: the history of philosophy, philosophical anthropology, epistemology, aesthetics, social philosophy, sociology of the individual.
• History and Ethnography: Source Studies, Archaeology and Social History of Byzantium, Ural and Siberian Archeology and Ethnography, Siberian and Ural archaeography; social history of the Urals and Siberia, theory and history of international relations.
• Philology: onomastics, dialect lexicology and lexicography, lexical semantics, linguistics and stylistics, folklore and literature of the Urals and Siberia, Russian classical and modern literature, literary stylistics, theory and history of journalism.
• Economics: Regional Economics, competition and institutional aspects of economic growth, foreign investment and international transfer of technology, corporate governance, economic history and the history of economic thought, mathematical methods in economics.

UrFU Alumni Association was established in October 2012. In 2012-2013, the University established offices of the Alumni association in Mongolia and Russian cities of Moscow, Nizhny Tagil, Kamensk-Uralsky and Noyabrsk; it allows the graduates living and working in these countries and cities to maintain contact with the university. It also plans to establish offices in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Israel and Germany.

Ural Federal University currently holds the following positions in national and global rankings:

• placed 701-800th in the Academic Ranking of World Universities, 2018[15]
• placed 11th among Russian universities (Webometrics Ranking of World Universities), 2019[16]
• placed 43rd in the QS Emerging Europe and Central Asia, 2019;[17]
• placed 14-15th in the ranking of national universities by the Interfax Rating Agency;[18]
• placed 58th among BRICS countries universities (QS World University Rankings: BRICS), 2019;[19]

The "Dedicatied to Young People" short film, which features Ural Federal University graduates giving advice to the current UrFU students, won the ‘Most Creative Corporate Institution Video’ QS-Apple Creative Award and received the title of QS-Apple Creative Idol. The contest was held on November 17, 2011, at the 7th QS Asia Pacific Professional Leaders in Education Conference and Exhibition, in Manila (Philippines), and was organized by Quacquarelli Symonds.[20]

• Open access in Russia