Universitas Gadjah Mada has opened an International Undergraduate Programme in Biology since March 2019.
This is a response from UGM to the need of biology experts as well as professionals in the global market.
“The IUP is the first in Indonesia for undergraduate level in biology,” said Dean of Faculty of Biology UGM, Prof. Dr. Budi Setiadi Daryono, M.Agr.Sc., on Thursday (19/9) whilst delivering Dean’s remarks to celebrate the 64th anniversary of the Faculty.
He explained there had been a high interest among students with 142 people applying and 11 meeting the requirement to get admitted.
Budi described Faculty of Biology has the vision to be a faculty that is acknowledged internationally as a centre for education, research, and community services in terms of biology science, especially tropical biology. To meet this goal, in 2018 the Faculty through its undergraduate programme earned an international accreditation from ASIIN in Germany.
Meanwhile, academic internationalisation of its master programme started in 2019 by applying for an AUN-QA certification. On doctoral programme, a joint doctorate degree program was initiated with The Graduate School of Integrative Biology, the University of Montpellier, France in 2018/2019 academic year.
The first university that runs biology programme in the country, the Faculty continues to assess its quality assurance and curriculum development. The learning achievement based assessment method will continue to be adopted since 2018 for getting international accreditations.
While to improve the teaching quality, Faculty of Biology always encourages its lecturers for further studies. It already has 71 lecturers with 36 master’s degree and 35 doctoral degree in addition to 5 professorships.
In terms of research, Budi explained a significant increase with 133 research compared to 93 and 83 in the previous periods. There are also 176 research articles have been indexed by Scopus.
“This showed that the lecturer’s performance in publication is very high, even the ratio of publication and number of lecturers is 2,9, or each lecturer produces 3 articles per year,” he said.
Rector of UGM, Prof. Ir. Panut Mulyono, M.Eng.,D.Eng., IPU., appreciated this by saying that he hoped the Faculty on its anniversary could give bigger contributions to the national development and the achievement of the SDGs. According to the Rector, Faculty of Biology has the potential to be a world reference following the extent of science that is available related to Indonesia’s biodiversity.
Events following the Dean’s remarks was scientific remarks by the Director of Graduate Programme in Agriculture Management of Instiper, Prof. Dr. Kadarwati Budiharjo, SU, titled Role of Biology in Biotropics Development of Oil Palm Commodity in Indonesia to Address Global Climate Change and Black Campaign from the EU Commission.