Building up a New Master Program in Physical and Theoretical Chemistry in Quy Nhon University, Vietnam

Quy Nhon University was recently established but rapidly became the largest higher education institution in the South Central Coast and Western Highlands of Vietnam. It plays a pivotal role in the economic and cultural development of this region because almost high school teachers, technicians, managers, civil servants,... working there were graduated from this university. The current Bachelor programs in natural science, and in particular in chemistry, are well established. However a pressing demand of the local community for a higher education level exists that high quality post‐graduate programs in exact science should be established by QNU. Building up postgraduate programs in science is a very necessary task for the development of the Quy Nhon University. The chemistry department is taking the initiative to implement the Master degree in chemistry of two years with 120 credits starting in 2012. During the first year of the project we will work on the detailed curricullum and lecture notes for the Master program in Physical and Theoretical Chemistry. We will organize a meeting of QNU staffs with K.U.Leuven faculty who are expert in the relevant fields to discuss and elaborate a complete curriculum. This meeting will be held in Quy Nhon. The lecture notes and laboratory manuals will subsequently be developed by organising the training and lectures. From the second half of the first year, we will organize a number of visits of QNU staffs to Leuven to be trained in the teaching for master students in K.U.Leuven laboratories. These actions are very important for the QNU staffs because they need to have a lot of experiences both in teaching and carrying out research from K.U.Leuven experts. And also they need to work with the instruments in K.U.Leuven to be able to lead their students, and most importantly to evaluate about what equipments they really need to have in QNU. Every year, we will organize short visits of KULeuven professors to QNU to provide with some intensive specialized courses and help Quy Nhon colleagues for the task. After this project, the staffs of QNU chemistry department are expected to be able to takeover the teaching of most courses in the new master program, to select the necessary and affordable instruments, and to organize the research work for master students in their laboratories, following the curriculum elaborated.