The Greeting of the Rector
Our university is the oldest forestry university in the country. The entire history of the university is connected with the forest industry, with its development and changes, and with the need for qualified personnel of different levels and training profile.
By now, the number of forestry and forest industry specialists trained by the University has exceeded 75 thousand. Many of our graduates run businesses, work at all levels of the government, and lead research institutes and departments; many of them are successful entrepreneurs and highly qualified specialists.
Training is conducted in 21 areas of bachelors’ training, 13 areas of masters’ training, four areas of college education, and six areas of postgraduate studies. The University successfully implements the FORPEC Master’s program in English.
At present, 46 Doctors of Sciences, 33 professors, 139 candidates of sciences and 100 associate professors are involved in education and research activities of the university. At the university, 6.5 thousand students study.
Saint-Petersburg State Forestry University has always been and still remains a recognized research and development centre. It hosts nationally and internationally renowned teams of scientists capable of solving fundamental and applied problems in the fields of forest ecology, biodiversity conservation, climate regulation, reforestation, forest inventory, forest protection and conservation, deep wood processing, bioenergetics, forest economics and policy, and landscape architecture.
The university actively cooperates with 23 countries in Europe and Asia. Since 2008, it has been a member of the Finnish-Russian Cross border University. SPbFTU implements educational and research projects in cooperation with foreign partners, attracting funding from international programs of the European Union; it trains more than 680 international students from 32 countries in Asia, Europe and America, as well as from the CIS and Baltic countries.
Our University is proud of its park, which is not only a magnificent specimen of landscape architecture under the protection of the Committee for State Control, Architecture and Planning, but above all an educational base for the University’s students.
Our university cooperates with many industrial enterprises and state organizations, for which we train personnel. This allows to combine the potential of educational, scientific institutions and specialized industrial enterprises to solve a number of problems: improving the quality of training; formulation in cooperation with employers of professional requirements for modern specialists of all levels of training, professional development and retraining (including distance learning system), and introduction of innovative scientific developments and complex high-tech equipment into production.
Our priority task is to train personnel, primarily for the forest industry, which is impossible without close cooperation with industry enterprises and without radical changes in the industry itself.
Irina Albertovna Melnichuk, Rector