Libera Università di Bolzano

UNIBZ is the only trilingual (Italian, English and German) Italian university, comprising the Faculties of Computer Science, Science and Technology (FAST), Economics and Management, Education, and Design and Art. In national rankings, UNIBZ reaches top positions every year. In 2021, for the fifth consecutive year, Censis ranked UNIBZ as number one among smaller non-state universities. UNIBZ strongest pillars are "Citations" (with a score of 77,9 among the top 260) and "International outlook" (with a score of 76,4 among the top 250). In 2020, UNIBZ entered the QS World University Rankings 2021 at the position 601-650 among 5000 universities. It ranks at position 131 in the metrics for “International Faculty”.

In the last 5 years, FAST leaded and managed more than 15 M€ for competitive research funds, including European projects (Horizon 2020, JPI, ERANET and COST), FESR-EFRE (European Social Fund), PRIN and other national projects (German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, AGER, MiPAF) and several Regional and Provincial, which match with the scope of the present proposal. In addition, FAST managed a large investment Capacity Building fund (ca. 4 M€) for the development of a Technological Park in Bolzano (https://noi.bz.it/en).

Indeed, Food Sciences are approached from primary vegetable and animal production according to the principle of Food System, and from an engineering perspective consistently dedicated to Manufacturing Systems and Technologies, and to develop Smart Detection Solutions (e.g., biosensors), which complement the Food Science attributes. Within this frame, Food Technologists and Microbiologists have pivotal activities. Skills from FAST are usefully complemented by those colleagues from the Faculty of Computer Sciences, who provide fundaments of Big Data Management and Artificial Intelligence.

Although small non-state university, UNIBZ has solid national and international collaborations. Proofs of this are the quite large number of national and European projects which have been funded and represent the basis for a continuous networking among institutions; the increasing number of technology transfer projects with industries, mainly because of the NOI Tech Park facilities; the active participation to selective platforms (EIT Food and National Agri-food Cluster); and the high number of Master programs offered as joint degree in cooperation with national and international institutions. Within these latter, ON FOODS relevant teaching offers are the International PhD on Food Engineering and Biotechnology, the Master in Food Sciences together with the Universities of Parma and Udine, and foreign partners such as the University College Cork (Ireland) and Wageningen University of Food Science, and the Bachelor in Mountain Enogastronomy.