TEHRAN – A memorandum of understanding (MOU) was inked between Iran and Hungary on Thursday to expand cooperation on academic and scientific fields, IRNA reported.

Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Peter Siarto, who headed an economic delegation to Tehran, signed an MOU with Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian to grant scholarships to citizens of Iran and Hungary annually.

Under the MOU, in different sections of basic sciences, engineering, humanities, agriculture, 100 scholarships per year in undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral degrees and a number in the form of research and study opportunities are awarded to applicants for 6 to 9 months, Hossein Salar-Amoli, head of the international scientific cooperation center of the Ministry of Science said.

The educational cooperation program and the MOU are valid for 3 years, he further stated.

Iranian universities making progress

Most recently, fifteen universities from Iran have been listed among the best institutions worldwide, by the U.S. News and World Report Best Global Universities rankings 2022.

Also, the Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) Graduate Employability Rankings 2022 list has been released, which included three Iranian universities out of a total of 550 institutes worldwide that highlighted graduate employment processes.

Some 41 Iranian universities in engineering sciences and 12 universities in computer sciences have made a place among the top 1,188 universities in the world with the announcement of Higher Education World University Rankings 2022 by subject.

It also has introduced 59 Iranian universities among the top institutions in World University Rankings 2022.

The THE Education Young University Rankings 2021 listed 26 Iranian institutions among the world’s best universities that are 50 years old or younger.

Moreover, some 34 Iranian universities and institutions were listed among the top 1,000 in the world, according to Shanghai Ranking’s Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) 2021.

Science diplomacy at the highest level

Data from the Scopus International Citation Database show that Iran’s scientific diplomacy has reached more than 34 percent since the beginning of 2021, the highest level in the past 20 years.

Science diplomacy is the use of scientific collaborations among nations to address common problems and to build constructive international partnerships. It is a form of new diplomacy and has become an umbrella term to describe a number of formal or informal technical, research-based, academic, or engineering exchanges, within the general field of international relations.

Comparing the rate of 2020 with 2019, Iran with a growth of 12.5 percent and with a slight difference with India has gained second place in the world in terms of the growth of world science diplomacy, Mohammad Javad Dehghani, head of the Islamic World Science Citation Center (ISC), said.

The share of Iranian articles with international participation has had significant growth of 209 percent during an eight-year period (2013-2020), becoming the Islamic world’s leading country in science diplomacy, according to the Scopus International Citation Database.

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