At the end of the year, I would like to sum up its most important results and try to look beyond the horizon. It is very difficult to gain an insight into where, why, and how we need to move. We have been doing this for a long time at the TSU League of Deans, strategic sessions, and management committees. It was a very large-scale and, at the same time, meticulous work that involved a significant number of people - members of our university community and invited experts. In addition, in recent years we have been working on the founding of the Big University - the union of Tomsk universities. This work has scored significant results: four (!) of six Tomsk universities entered the state support program Priority 2030 and, the top hundred Russian universities – Tomsk State University, Tomsk Polytechnic University, Tomsk University of Control Systems and Radioelectronics, and Siberian State Medical University. Tomsk State University of Architecture and Construction became a candidate for this program. All universities presented finished roadmaps indicating the amount of required funding, available partners, etc. It is a sensational result and an unprecedented story, given that there are 266 universities in Moscow alone, over 80 in St. Petersburg, and around 30 in Novosibirsk.

In total, about 200 Russian universities applied for the competition, 106 of them passed its first stage and received core funding in the amount of 100 million rubles. Fifty-four     universities were selected to participate in the second round of the competition for the     special part of the grant on one of two tracks: “Research Leadership”; or “Territorial and/or Industry Leadership”. Tomsk State University successfully passed both stages and found itself in the first group of the “Research Leadership” track with the special part of the grant in the amount of 994 million rubles.

Despite the fact that the atmosphere of the defense of the programs was constructive, the framework of the competition was set very rigidly. They were determined by the great challenges and directions of the strategy of scientific-technology development. In fact, all universities had to answer the question: what can they do for Russia? And it was necessary to come up with a very concrete answer. In other words, since you are asking the state for additional resources, what are you offering the country in return? With     several minutes for our presentation, we had to present our main plans and ambitions and then answer all the questions from the members of the Council of the Priority 2030 program. Along with the main policymakers responsible for the development of higher education and science in Russia, the Council included experts from various spheres of the economy and public life. Therefore, they asked a wide variety of questions, sometimes with very unexpected focus.

Minister of Science and Higher Education, Valery Falkov, warned everyone in advance that the Council was facing a difficult choice, since “it is necessary to assess the ambitiousness of goals, the  breakthrough nature of scientific research and technological leadership, and not the current status and merits of the universities”. In other words, the competition was organized according to the Olympic Games principle - “past victories are not counted”. We had to start afresh and win. The Council objectively and impartially evaluated the development programs of the universities.

With seven years of experience in the 5-100 project, we have learned to make non-trivial decisions and propose nonlinear growth strategies. I am convinced that only such an approach can ensure we remain competitive even with limited resources. This is confirmed by the required indicators of our achievements over seven years. For example, the number of scientific publications in the Web of Science and Scopus journals has increased fivefold, and in the Q1 and Q2 journals, such a number has increased sevenfold. TSU went up 350 points on the QS rankings over seven years and this is the great merit of the entire staff of Tomsk State University.

Entering the Priority 2030 program as a union of Tomsk universities was one of our main non-trivial decisions. Submitting to the competition as such, we still identified our own priorities but complemented each other guided by the principles of synergy and collaboration. It allowed us to reach large-scale tasks that each university could not have solved alone. As I expected, most Russian universities applied for the Priority 2030 program at the last moment. But, as you know, serious matters do not take shape     quickly. We have actually been doing this for the last three years. In addition, we formed our program considering the ecosystem principle, which implies the creation of joint structures with strong partners - the largest industrial companies and research organizations. Thus, strategically, we pulled this whole story to a completely new level, proposing a new constructive approach to solving the problem of implementing higher     academic science.

All this was noted by the commission members, who sensed our maturity, and therefore our program was assessed very positively. But even in our wildest dreams, we could not assume that we would be able to get into not only the first but also the second wave of the Priority 2030 project, with almost all of the participating Tomsk universities. Now there are many people talking and writing about it. In total, this is almost a 3 billion budget, which will be allocated for the development of Tomsk universities. However, along with new resources, a new level of responsibility emerges. Yes, we have climbed the mountain, but now we need to think about holding our ground     .

Tomsk State University is now viewed as one of the leaders of Russian higher education. Serious success must be converted into real deeds. The logic and main content of our development program in the ten-year cycle of the 2030 Priority can be described as follows:

TSU should become an intrinsically world-class university generating advanced knowledge and technology. Today we are all concerned that Russia is losing its leadership in space, aircraft construction, and end-to-end technologies, such as biotechnology, quantum technologies, and genetic engineering. Accordingly, Russia runs the risk of becoming a "colony" of the United States or China. But there are also chances to become one of the three world technological leaders. As a research university, we must become the center of one of the ecosystems working for this strategy. The creation of an ecosystem that attracts partners from businesses, state corporations, various foundations, and other research centers to pool the resources necessary for the development of innovative technologies is one of the basic principles of our transformation for the coming years.

We have divided our goals into three levels in accordance with different ambitions and scales of tasks: global, national, and regional. The global level implies entering the scientific frontiers and becoming a center for attracting talented people, providing the export of technology and education for the market of Southeast Asia - a traditional region of our cooperation and geopolitical influence. The national level is: associated with the development of technologies that ensure the security and sovereignty of Russia as a state; the introduction of new mechanisms for the integration of universities, research institutes, and industrial partners; establishing a center of excellence in data-driven education management. The regional level is the further development of the Big University and the university town that determines the economic development of the region.

TSU has four main areas as its research priorities: global Earth and climate changes, socio-humanitarian engineering, engineering biology 2.0, and safety technologies.

The first priority is comprehensive research, including monitoring, assessment, and forecasting the carbon cycle in the Arctic. They are necessary for modeling the climate and developing programs to protect against the consequences of its change, as well as to prevent natural disasters. The consequence risks of anthropogenic impact on the environment, natural resources, and the quality of life of the population of Siberia and the Arctic in the context of the socio-economic development of the region will also be investigated. So far, we have succeeded in some research directions: along with four institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences, we won a grant for the creation of a carbon testing ground in the Tomsk region. Its purpose will be to create a scientific and educational infrastructure for the development and testing of technologies for controlling the balance of climate-active gases.

Despite the fact that the second priority is articulated as socio-humanitarian engineering, it is based on deep interdisciplinary studies of the limits of possible human transformations in the context of modern transhumanism. Such research is needed because by the beginning of the 21st century, due to the emergence of NBIC technologies and experiments in the field of genetics, ethology, cognitive science, transplantology, and artificial intelligence, boundaries between human and non-human began to blur for the first time in the history of human existence. This is happening very quickly. Social technologies, as understood by Michel Foucault, also have a dramatic impact on human life. Thus, socio-humanitarian engineering is an approach to defining the boundaries of humanity, from fundamental questions on how a person can live in this changing world and remain human, to technologies for socio-humanitarian support of the human in a person and their mature responsible behavior. This becomes especially relevant in the context of the digitalization of a huge number of services and processes that people used to implement only in the analog format. For example, there is currently a request from banking institutions to prevent fraud with financial payments on social networks. People often invite it themselves and are ready to be deceived. How can we help them to develop patterns of mature behavior? This requires appropriate social and humanitarian technologies.

The third priority of the target model of our university is engineering biology, a frontier direction of modern science that can radically improve the quality of life and solve a variety of industrial  problems - from the development of new drugs to the production of new types of environmentally friendly products and biofuels that reduce anthropogenic pressure on the planet. Here we have a plan to form large national cooperation, consisting of four consortia in the main areas of engineering biology: bioprinting, biomedicine, agroecobiotechnology, and synthetic biotechnology. Our partners will be Russian academic institutions and foreign universities, as well as large manufacturing companies. Together with two Tomsk universities, we have already got support for three large projects. The first is the creation of a prototype genomic printer for high-performance printing of short DNA sections that are used both for assembling previously known genes and creating their new sequences. Such a device cannot be purchased on the market. You can only purchase a very expensive DNA printing service by contacting the leaders in the field - the United States or China. It is critically important for our country to have its own facility, because this opens up tremendous opportunities in solving a variety of genetic problems: gene therapy; the creation of new drugs that can cure various diseases, including cardiovascular and oncological ones. The third project is focused on the study of the microbiota of farm animals, which will solve the problem of providing the population with safe products that do not contain microbes with resistance to antibiotics.

Our fourth priority is the transdisciplinary Security Technologies project that, in fact, relates to all other projects and policies that we are focused on and intersects with all areas of scientific and technological development of our country. The strategic goal of this project is to create an interdisciplinary scientific basis, platform solutions, and a depository of sovereign security technologies necessary for a timely response to new challenges arising from the rapidly growing complexity of the world and the emergence of new man-made threats of terroristic, radiological, biogenic, and cyber nature. An example of an integrated approach to solving these problems is the Smart and Safe Territory project that we are starting together with the Rosatom State Atomic Energy Corporation. It involves the systematic integration of individual domestic technologies that provide various aspects of security within our campus and the whole region.

All four priorities have grown on the basic research blocks formed during the 5-100 Program. Implementing all these priority areas will also be accompanied by the training of highly qualified specialists with relevant competencies. Both new and basic directions of development are united by the logic of four “frameworks” that must be taken into account when designing the strategies of all TSU faculties and laboratories:

1) Becoming a Breakthrough university. This means that when setting scientific goals, it is necessary to constantly update the agenda and enter new subject fields, focusing on the frontier directions of modern science. That is, standing on the front line and looking beyond the horizon at all times!

Transdisciplinarity. This is another challenge - to learn how to work at the intersection of different scientific realities, to create an environment as a single research ecosystem for representatives of different sciences so that biologists, sociologists, mathematicians, psychologists, big data specialists, and others would systematically do projects together. There should be many such projects at the university. Anyone who manages to set a culture of interdisciplinary dialogue and collaboration will solve the problem of establishing a Breakthrough university. For us, it is quite real, since a system of horizontal communications has already been formed at TSU. Thus, our classical university is not going to disappear anywhere but will build up a new quality, entering the frontiers of scientific knowledge.

3) Ecosystems as the ability to draw in missing resources from the external environment and create new joint structures for the development of end-to-end technologies and innovative products.

4) The sustainability of the development of society and the quality of human life. Whatever a university team is working on, this should ultimately increase the sustainability of the development of society and the quality of every person’s life. We have already realized that the technological revolution is upsetting ecological balances and creating a variety of risks. Therefore, it is very important to manage our scientific and technological development responsibly, thinking not only about direct consequences but also about possible side effects; to be responsible to future generations for what we leave behind on this planet.

The Council of the Priority 2030 program was also worried about policies our university will rely on in its continued transformation. In order to ensure sustainable nonlinear growth, we keep the “run - change - disrupt” ideology, which fully proved its potential at the previous stage. The “run” format allows us to take good care of the basic processes and to form the involvement of the maximum number of people in university management (“shared governance”). On the other hand, there are change management processes – (the “change” part), i.e. efficiency, complexity, diversity, and communication. Finally, there are "disrupt" projects that fundamentally transform the way the university used to do some things. For example, the search for applicants who are most relevant to the profiles of certain educational programs by analyzing their "digital footprints" in social networks; introduction of educational technologies of "School 21", which are based on the Peer-to-Peer principle (each student is at the same time a teacher for another student), etc. In addition, now we are going to experiment with the graph of the ontological model of a classical university, dynamic analysis communication field, predictive analytics, and artificial intelligence in change management. These are completely new tools that help to perceive     and understand the inner semantic and communicative fabric of the university, to anticipate many processes and effects before they make themselves seen in reality. Run - change - disrupt formats target different types of people and different modes of operation. They allow all university people to find their place in the overall plans of the university and to show the degree of initiative, innovation, and responsibility to which they are most inclined. This management policy helps to identify talents and leaders among employees and students and maximize their potential.

The main principle of TSU's research policy in the Priority 2030 is continuity and innovation: support for existing key research teams and basic directions, plus entry into new complex topics, which are  mentioned above. Our tasks are very ambitious. For example, we plan to increase the total turnover of our small innovative enterprises to 5 billion rubles by 2030 and increase income from intellectual property to 500 million rubles a year. If we look at the research policy of TSU for the next 10 years through the prism of the "run - change - disrupt" concept, then the results in the "run" format should be an increase in the Hirsch index of our university from 117 in 2020 up to 276 in 2030; an increase in the number of TSU Q1-Q2 journals in the Web of Science and Scopus databases from 6 to 15. The “change” format provides the formation and development of more than 60 world-class laboratories, the Regional Technology Transfer Center, a startup studio, and the first university venture fund in Russia. The "disrupt" format helps to open the Engineering Biology 2.0 hub, the Human Life Design Center, the Future Food Institute, the Carbon Cycle Assessment and Forecast Center, and a platform of sovereign technologies. Particular attention will be paid to training the younger generation of researchers.

The educational policy of TSU is no less ambitious. Speaking about the basic processes in education, it is necessary to mention the further strengthening of its connection with science through a cross-cutting research track and the development of critical thinking. This approach has already led to the fact that TSU currently occupies one of the leading places in Russia in terms of the number of medals for students and young scientists.

We have a plan to include at least 10,000     schoolchildren from 200 schools in the Tomsk region and 20 schools in other regions of the Russian Federation in university programs for talented youth; attract more than 2,000 young participants to Siberian Sirius center. New educational programs will provide personal tracks and tutoring, a digital platform environment, and adaptive micro-content. The expansion of Russian education, which will be carried out by TSU, is based on the principles of internationalization and openness. This will     bring     the contingent of foreign students to 30,     000     people, the opening of five resource centers, and two joint international universities abroad. The "disrupt" format creates a space for educational experiments in which EdTech startups and advanced technologies will operate.

A special section of our program is devoted to the formation of the Big Tomsk University, which in 2030 will be an open ecosystem of knowledge and technology generation, consisting of a number of interconnected and integrated subsystems focused on major challenges. In addition to the four priorities mentioned above, this ecosystem will include the priorities of other Tomsk universities: "Energy of the Future", "Health Engineering" and "New Engineering Education" (TPU); "Microelectronics and Communication Systems of a New Generation", "Safe Digital Environment and Cyber-Physical Systems" (TUSUR); "Precision Medicine" and "Bionic Digital Platforms" (Siberian State Medical University); "Secondary Resources in Construction" and "Digit for Construction" (TSUAC).

Important infrastructural elements of the ecosystem are the "city-university" with the "Tomsk - the student capital of Russia" brand and a world-class "inter-university campus" as a laboratory for sustainable development.

An inter-university campus for 10,000 students should be built by 2024 as a multi-resident model, uniting representative offices of large Russian and foreign companies, Tomsk universities, scientific organizations, small businesses, and creative industries. The campus will become the so-called "innovation quarter" - the environment for the development of the new economy. As for the Big University of Tomsk, by 2030 at least 100,000     students will study there, of which 30–35% will be international.

It is possible that this time I have described too many indicators, directions, and projects. But as well-known entrepreneur and writer Robert Kiyosaki once said that goals should be clear, simple and written down. If they are not written down on paper and you review them every day, these are not goals. These are wishes.     In this case, the goals are not just “written down”, but are already in the process of being realized. However, there is also a place for wishes here: may we all have enough strength and inspiration to achieve our goals and together become even stronger!

Eduard Galazhinskiy,

Rector of National Research Tomsk State University,

Acting President of the Russian Academy of Science

Translated by Snezhana Nosova