Brief history
The Graduate Program in Mechanical Sciences was conceived in 2001 aimed at training masters and doctors to reach a distinguished capacity to affect the state-of-the-art in the field of Mechanical Sciences, and at providing them with the ability to act as autonomous producers of knowledge and to lead new centers of research and technology. For this purpose, we built a solid educational proposal in the subareas of Mechanical Engineering.
In 2002, lying on a recommendation by the Brazilian Agency for Higher Education - CAPES, our program started its activities by offering a master’s degree program, and in 2005 started providing a doctoral program in Mechanical Sciences, which is still the only doctoral course in topics of interest for the field of Mechanical Engineering in the Center-West region. Therefore, the program has strategic importance for graduate education and scientific development of the region, among other factors.
Goals
The main strategical goals of our graduate program, from a social perspective, are:
- To train doctors with an autonomous capacity to produce scientific knowledge and with a commitment to sustainable and innovative development;
- To train masters that can apply scientific methods to the solution of academic and industrial problems and challenges;
- To produce knowledge that impacts the solution of problems in the areas encompassed by the program.
At present
Seventeen years after its opening, our graduate program has reached a level of academic maturity that allows us to provide the society with a standard of excellence and reference regarding its research lines. Throughout its existence, our graduate program has presented a significant increase either in the level of educational excellence and in the quality and quantity of its production. The program has provided 209 masters and 63 doctors with training in Mechanical Sciences until 2018 and published 450 scientific papers in high-impact international journals.
The graduate program has experienced a great development over this quadrennium (2017-present), both in quality and quantity of its production. The program has offered training to 73 masters and 31 doctors in Mechanical Sciences until July 2019. 51% of the intellectual production mentioned for the program counted with the participation of students and/or graduates, contrasting with only 38% in the areas of Engineering III, according to the content of a document published in 2019. When restricting it to a focus on intellectual production including co-authoring of students or graduates, based on the document of the abovementioned area, the area per se has half of the papers published in less representative strata, while 94.4% of the production from our program counted with the participation of students or graduates in more significant strata. Over this quadrennium, 64.5% of the doctoral dissertations have generated intellectual production – all in A1 or A2 strata – and 63% of the master thesis resulted in publication in scientific events or very representative journals. The resources gathered by our program through research projects over this quadrennium have numbered around 35 million in the Brazilian currency. The actions of internationalization and national insertion are many, including invitations for keynote lectures in events abroad, awards for students in international conferences, programs of cooperation in the doctoral scope, courses of sandwich doctorate, research projects with international collaboration, among others. Regarding our laboratory infrastructure, the program counts with experimental facilities of both national and international reference.
Currently, the program has four research lines:
- Dynamics of Mechanical Systems
- Energy and Environment
- Fatigue, Fracture & Materials
- Fluid Mechanics of Complex Flows
