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Cyprus Institute aims for top world research billing
(From "Cyprus Mail" Saturday, 5 June 2002)


THE CYPRUS Development Bank believes the new Cyprus Institute it is planning to set up will, "in terms of excellence, be viewed with other world famous private elite research driven universities like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Santa Fe Institute," General Manager Yiannakis Ioannides said yesterday.

He was speaking ahead of today's lunch in Nicosia to introduce the Institute, which the Development Bank has pioneered as a top new research and education centre.

The institute's stated objective is to provide a new research and educational institute, with a strong scientific and technological orientation that would be achieved through an "evolutionary approach funded by global resources that addresses the concerns of the global community and derives its support from the global community," said Ioannides.

The institute plans to draw upon the knowledge and expertise of some of the finest minds in the world, who will be in Cyprus over the next few days, including Nobel prize winners in Chemistry (Paul Crutzen, 1995) and Medicine (Harold Varmus, 1989) as well as professors from MIT, Harvard, Yale and Cornell and top European universities and research institutes.

"This is one of the very rare occasions in human endeavour when so many people from so many diverse sources are congregating on a small island to address the issues of the global community," added Ioannides.

According to a press release from the Bank, the thinking behind the new institution is to take educational standards beyond the limitations of 'traditional universities, shaped in earlier historical and technological eras, that are ill-suited to manage the newly emerged enabling technologies." It claims that "the Cyprus Institute will be attuned by design to the newest technologies, challenges and opportunities of the 21st century."

The institute will be residential in nature and self-supporting through fees and gifts. An eventual student body of approximately 3,000 is expected, of which 2,000 will be undergraduates and 1,000 research and professional graduate students. It is estimated that the centre will require a capital investment of several hundred million euros, with ongoing operational expenses in excess of 60 million euros.

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