On November 3, the leaders of MEPhI and other leading engineering and technical universities of the country signed an agreement on the creation of a consortium "Scientific Instrumentation". The new association is designed to create domestic analogues of imported scientific instruments.
Signing an agreement on the formation of a consortium
The signing ceremony was opened by MIPT Rector Dmitry Livanov. He stated that the state program "Scientific Instrumentation" is a unique case of a project initiated by the scientific community itself and very quickly implemented, thanks to the support of Presidential Aide Andrei Fursenko and the Ministry of Science and Higher Education. The program was initiated a year ago by four leading technical universities in Russia - MEPhI, Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, Bauman Moscow State Technical University and National Research University of Electronic Technology.
The program was officially launched by the presidential order signed in February 2022, and already in September the Russian government approved a roadmap and a project for the development of scientific instrumentation.
The consortium members must create 92 scientific instruments, work should start in 2023. At the same time, it was decided that 15 devices will be built by the end of this year. Documentation for the start of mass production for five of them should be ready by 2024, and for the remaining ten - by 2025. Among such devices, two developments of MEPhI are a tandem mass spectrometer and a measuring complex for vector synthesis and signal analysis.
The potential demand is quite large: in recent years, scientific instruments worth about 30 billion rubles have been purchased in Russia annually, and 80% of this amount was imported.
MEPhI Rector Vladimir Shevchenko noted in his speech that industrial partners of the university, including the State Corporation Rosatom, are already showing interest in the devices being developed. Vladimir Shevchenko also expressed hope that the devices developed under the program could be recognized in the markets of third countries - since there have already been cases when domestic inventions surpassed the products of Western and Japanese competitors in terms of price / quality ratio.
