What is EuroBaltic Centres of Excellence?

EuroBaltic Centres of Excellence is an organization for Research and Development of Advanced Master and PhD programs in Social Science.

“EuroBaltic Centres of Excellence” is established after the closure of EuroFaculty, which was supported by the Council of Baltic Sea States (CBSS) in the period 1994-2005. The overall objective of “EuroBaltic Centres of Excellence” is to stimulate research activities at the universities in social sciences in the Baltic countries. The establishment of EuroBaltic Centres of Excellence” will secure a continuation of the emerging research part of EuroFaculty especially related to the Eurofaculty PhD institution and change focus during the latest years towards research based teaching in the EuroFaculty course programmes. To implement these endeavours 8-12 Units of Centres of Excellence within social science will be established and in the three Baltic countries.

 

The specific jobs of EuroFaculty Centres of Excellence are the creation and monitoring of:

 

1. Advanced master and PhD programmes
2. Scientific conferences
3. Formation of International Evaluation Committees to select:

Foreign Guest Researchers

4. Baltic Students for EuroFaculty PhD grants
Young Baltic Research Fellows
Senior Baltic Research fellows
Baltic Guest Researchers

 

5. Scientific publications (As Baltic Journal of Economics)
6. Information centre on:
Baltic PhD students
Baltic PhD projects
International PhD courses relevant for Baltic PhD students

 

Project period: 1 September 2005 – 31 August 2011
Place: University of Latvia in cooperation with parallel projects at the University of Tartu and Vilnius University

 

Development Strategies

 

1. Create clusters of Baltic research groups in social science

An effective research environment demands a certain thresholds of resources. This might be difficult to establish in the individual Baltic country given lack of staff and limited budgetary means. To circumvent this problem a research group should therefore be formed cross-national.

 

2. Create two-way research links

Baltic research fellows should be connected to international (especially Germany and the Nordic) research groups. However, it is desirable to create research groups in the Baltic countries, which could be interesting to visit for international research fellows (especially from Germany and the Nordic Countries).

 

3. Create transparency in the selection of PhD students.

For the moment the EuroFaculty PhD grants are announced in competition among all Baltic students. An international team organized by EuroFaculty of social scientists selects the PhDs supported. This system select the best and gives clear guidelines for scientific progress.

 

4. Create advanced Masters programs and Common (Nordic-Baltic-German)

 

Master programs

5 . Encourage and sponsor scientific Baltic journals and monographs .

 

Assumptions about the centres:

  1. Only one centre of a given subject in the three Baltic countries.
  2. A goal of minimum 15 research fellows placed in the centre as full time researchers. A core group of a minimum of 10 should be permanently connected to the host university. 2 could be from other Baltic countries and 3 from rest of the world. This goal should be achieved in 2012 while 2/3 should be achieved in 2009.
  3. EuroFaculty selects the centres through all Baltic competitions. The main criterion is the ability of the involved universities to create the necessary core group of research fellows within the given field.
  4. Salaries of the Baltic researchers should be competitive with alternative salaries available for highly qualified students.

A main goal for the centres is to publish scientific articles at international level. The centres in economics use (among others the EuroFaculty based) Baltic Journal of Economics as outlet for their studies.

Similar Baltic based scientific journals should be established in Political Science.

 

The Development strategy and Action plan should be adapted as a part of the Baltic national states development strategy .

AUGUST, 31st 2005