Brown univ, IIT-B to tie up

Ivy League College, Brown University, is tying up with the Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay (IIT-B) for student and faculty exchange as well as research programmes.

Ivy League College, Brown University, is tying up with the Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay (IIT-B) for student and faculty exchange as well as research programmes.

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This will be the second Ivy League college to collaborate with the premier engineering institute.

An earlier tie-up with Harvard Business School expired last year. “If we want to be at the cutting edge of research in certain fields we need to collaborate with institutes here,” said Brown University’s vice-president of International Affairs, Matthew Gutmann, who was in the city on Wednesday.

Ruth Simmons, president of the university based in Rhode Island, had visited IIT-B in March this year and that is when the idea of a collaboration was born.

While the details are still to be fully worked out, as of now a student exchange programme (engineering and science students) for a semester have been decided, which will then be extended to faculty members. Already, faculty members from both institutes collaborate on research, but at an individual and not at the institute level.

The university has been focusing on India and celebrated the last year as the year of India as a way of understanding the rising importance of India in world affairs.

They already have a tie up with St Stephen’s College in Delhi for the past 20 years and are now in talks with Lady Shri Ram College, Delhi.

“We are also looking at tying up with organisations that focus on policies. We have approached the Observer Research Foundation, a policy think tank,” said Ashutosh Varshney, professor of political science with a focus on south Asian studies.