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At 14 years of age, the Università della Svizzera italiana (USI) is one of the youngest and most dynamic universities in
Switzerland. While continuing to work on the quality of its teaching and research in its founding Faculties – Economics,
Architecture and Communication Sciences – more recently USI ventured out beyond the humanities and the social
sciences, to reach the hard sciences: a new departure that opens up fresh opportunities in both research and education.
Involvement in the hard sciences further reinforces one of USI’s most important characteristics: its international
orientation.
Professor Martinoli, the Faculty of Informatics was set up in 2004 and the
Institute of Computational Sciences in 2008: why opt for disciplines that
are so different from the three existing Faculties?
“In both cases USI has opted for original choices that are sustainable
over time and have great potential both in terms of education and of
scientific research. We also weighed up our opportunities and synergies
with other research centres in the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland,
to boost our critical mass at an international level."
What have been the initial results of these choices?
“Looking back over the past five years, I'm happy to say that with the
decision to create the Faculty of Informatics we played a winning card.
The number of registered students continues to increase and its success
is evident above all from the point of view of the competitive research
funds that the new Faculty has been able to attract to Lugano. We are
now the third-largest centre for informatics in Switzerland after the
two Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology. As to computational
sciences, on the other hand, it is too early to draw any conclusions
because the Master’s degree doesn’t start until next academic year. But
I am very confident: the new institute offers us the possibility of
addressing problems of great interest and complexity in a vast range of
disciplines, and so to further enhance our reputation as an innovative
and interdisciplinary university. Obviously, the presence in Ticino of
the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS), which is run by
the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETHZ), has had
a crucial influence on this choice. And it is precisely with the group
of computational sciences of ETHZ, located on our Lugano Campus,
that we shall develop beneficial synergies. But other research partners
in our neighbourhood will also be involved in the activities of the new
institute: the Department of Innovative Technologies at SUPSI and
the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB), soon to be affiliated
to USI.”
What is the potential for research in this new field?
“It is huge: with the advent of the new generation of supercomputers,
which operate as virtual laboratories in their own right, computational
sciences help us to address, using modelling and numerical simulation,
problems of great interest and complexity right across a broad spectrum
of disciplines. A university such as ours could never have afforded the
investment required to engage actively in the domain of experimental
research, which these days is extremely expensive. But now, thanks to
supercomputers and the expertise developed at the new institute, we will
be able to engage immediately in numerous new areas of research.”
For example?
“There are countless applications, but if we are to make optimum use of
them, we will need to put all our efforts into developing mathematical tools
(algorithms) capable of fully exploiting the complex architecture of
the new supercomputers. With these instruments we should be able to
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address relevant problems in biology (enzyme reactions, drug design),
bioengineering (implants), in materials science (designing materials with
tailor-made properties), in fluid dynamics, meteorology and in
finance (market analysis). In some cases, in addition to the potential
of supercomputing, we will be able to exploit synergies with other
research centres in the region.”
Both degree curricula are in English: why?
“This is a choice we had to make; having made it, we can now draw
on a pool of students and researchers from a much wider catchment
area than Canton Ticino or neighbouring Italy. We have adopted the
same logic for most of our Master’s degree courses and the results have
been excellent: so far more than 60% of our students have come from
abroad, and they have chosen Lugano for the originality of its degree
programmes. There is a fundamental consideration underlying our
decision: USI has never been envisaged as a university only for the
population of Ticino; it wouldn’t have made any sense. And without
of course reneging on, or neglecting, strong bonds with our native
region, our strategy has been to widen our horizons internationally,
creating a broad range of opportunities also for our home students. To
this end, the English language seemed an obvious and indispensable
passe-partout.”
Campus Lugano,
Via Giuseppe Buffi 13, CH-6904 Lugano
Campus Mendrisio,
Largo Bernasconi 2, CH-6850 Mendrisio
E-mail: press@usi.ch - Website: www.usi.ch
© Università della Svizzera italiana
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