In the meeting held on Monday, June 27^th, 2018, Dr. Karimi, TUMS Chancellor, Dr. Kordi and Dr. Sahraian, Vice-chancellors for International affairs and Research and Technology, Dr. Nokoofar, the Director of International Relations, Accreditation and Ranking, Dr. Hamidieh, the Secretary of the Comprehensive Center of Advanced Medical-Surgical and Medical Stem Cells and Dr. Rezaie, the Vice-dean for International Affairs of the School of Medicine, Dr. Jan Nouwen and Dr. Tokameh Mahmoudi, representatives of the Erasmus MC were present and a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) was signed to initiate academic cooperation.

At the beginning of this meeting Dr. Kordi gave an introduction of TUMS and emphasized that the TUMS’ Office of Vice-chancellor for Global Strategies and International Affairs have had lots of collaboration with academic centers, universities and international institutes across the world in recent years. Moreover, these collaborations have led to signing a large number of memorandum of understandings, cooperation agreements, and exchanging students and staff.  He mentioned that currently TUMS has 845 international students from 45 countries.

Introducing the Erasmus University MC in slideshows, Dr. Jan Nouwen explained that the main activities of Erasmus MC are divided into three areas of treatment, medical education and research and innovation, and reported that Erasmus MC has more than 4,500 students. He added that more than 764 joint articles in health sciences have been published between the two countries of Iran and the Netherlands between 2008 and 2017. The representative of the Erasmus University MC continued that TUMS and Erasmus Medical Education Center have published 50 joint papers during this period.

He concluded his speech by explaining the mutual areas of cooperation with TUMS, saying that the implementation of educational programs with joint supervisors, joint degree programs and the exchange of students and staff can be defined in terms of cooperation between the two sets.

Dr. Tokameh Mahmoudi, a professor at the Erasmus MC, also presented some points about Organoid-technology and the activities of a knowledge based institute in this field as a subset of Erasmus MC.

Dr. Hamidieh, the Secretary of Center of Excellence for Stem Cell & Regenerative Medicine said that the Presidential Deputy  for Science and Technology has devoted a budget for building three polar stem cells at medical universities,TUMS included as one of these three universities to establish the Department of Organoids in Research and Diagnostics with the assistance of Dr. Mahmoudi, TUMS’ affiliate professor and professor at the Erasmus MC with her valuable experience in this field, are on the agenda.

At the end of the meeting, MoU was signed by Dr. Karimi, the TUMS Chancellor and Dr. Jan Nouwen, on behalf of the Dean of the Erasmus MC.

Reported By: S. Javedanfard