Monash University

Monash University was established by an Act of Parliament in 1958, making it the first university to be established in the State of Victoria for 106 years. Monash University is named after the prominent Australian Sir John Monash. From a single campus at Clayton with fewer than 400 students - located 25 km South East of Melbourne City-  Monash has grown into a network of campuses, centres and partnerships around the world with more than 50 000 students from over 130 countries.

Monash has 10 Faculties covering all academic disciplines. The faculties are distributed on six campus in the Melbourne region, one campus in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, one campus in South Africa and one centre in Prato, Italy.

There is good matching between many of LTU’s Department and the corresponding Monash Faculty. Most academics at LTU can find good partners for collaboration at Monash; often with complementary expertise. LTU students and PhD-students can generally find good supervisors at Monash for their Thesis work and parts of PhD studies. The teaching year structure at Monash is the reverse compared with universities on the Northern hemisphere. Semester 1 starts in late February and ends in early June. There is one week mid Semester break around the Easter holiday. The examinations take places in June. After that, there is two weeks of “winter” break. Semester 2 starts in mid July and ends in mid October, followed by 3-4 weeks examinations. The summer holiday for students lasts from mid November until mid-late February.

The collaboration started in early 1997 via a teaching exchange in the area of Electrical Engineering during 1997-1998.   Both partners realised that this collaboration created many benefits to the two Departments and to staff involved at both LTU and Monash University. Thus they decided to continue and expand the collaboration. During the following years, steps were taken to broaden the collaboration and to find funding. Indeed the following years have been successful and developed into a cross-university collaboration. The main funding during the first five years came from the Swedish Council for Higher Education (Grundutbildningsrådet) and from the Swedish institution STINT via their Institutional Grant and Teaching Excellence Programme.

There are a few key factors in the LTU-Monash collaboration since the start  

• The collaboration is built on both grassroots and top level
• We are using complementary expertise in order to create a win-win collaboration for both universities
• We have built a unique collaboration in both teaching and research with exchange of academic staff and exchange of both undergraduate and postgraduate students including Post Docs. The collaboration has over the ten years covered most of LTU’s and Monash faculties
• LTU students have an option to become exchange students at Monash
• LTU students have the option of doing Thesis (or equivalent) work at Monash and thus experience how academic life in an excellent university in Australia. They can also experience supervisions with complementary expertise compared with LTU
• LTU PhD students have the option within the PhD Polis framework, of doing parts of their PhD studies at Monash and also get double PhD badges, so far in the Faculties of Engineering and IT

Thus this collaboration program gives staff and students from LTU the opportunity to experience another university culture and to contribute to build strong international networks   The first Memorandum of Understanding was signed in February 1998. This agreement was extended and then signed by Monash VC Peter Darvall and LTU’s VC Ingegerd Palmer in April-May 2003.   LTU’s VC, Dr. Pia Sandvik Wiklund, visited Monash in late March 2007 and signed, together with Monash VC Richard Larkins, a new strategic CAREA agreement.

Contact - Monash

Sven Molin
Telephone: + 46 920 49 18 82
Email: sven.molin @ ltu.se

Kim Ng
- Contact at Monash
kim.c.ng @ eng.monash.edu