SAMK was elected for the board of the International Association of Maritime Universities

SAMK’s Sauli Ahvenjärvi with Tina Birgitte Sörensen from the Svendborg International Maritime Academy, Denmark and Irek Czarnowski from the Gdynia Maritime University from Poland. This team works in a project on maritime education and cyber security. 

SAMK was also chosen into the Policy Planning Committee (PPC) of the board. This is a significant gesture of trust and acknowledgement for SAMK for its 15 years of activities as a member of the IAMU.

Ninna Roos

The other members of the PPC consist of the Japanese secretary general of IAMU Takeshi Nakazawa, the representative of financer of the association, Nippon Foundation, who is also the chair of the board and comes from the California State University, USA. The task of the PPC is to prepare the activities of IAMU and present the plans to the International Executive Board.

According to Sauli Ahvenjärvi, who represented SAMK, the annual meeting also accepted SAMK’s application on a research Addressing Cyber Security in Maritime Education and Training as part of the project programme of IAMU for 2019.  This is significant achievement, because 90 % of the applications were rejected.

According to Ahvenjärvi there were a lot of applications and competition was hard, because 90 % of the applications were rejected. Peter Sandell says that SAMK will lead the project and he himself will work as the project manager. Other partners come from the Gdynia Maritime University, Poland and the Svendborg International Maritime Academy, Denmark.

The annual meeting and a conference related to it took place in Varna, Bulgaria in October. The participants included about 200 university professors on maritime education and researchers from different parts of the world. SAMK was also strongly visible in the conference. Ahvenjärvi,  Ninna Roos and Peter Sandell gave a presentation in the conference. In addition, Heikki Koivisto participated as a writer in one of the papers.

The aim of IAMU is to enhance cooperation and research between universities proving maritime education and to represent the education in the International Maritime Organization (IMO) which is part of the UN.

Nippon Foundation is a Japanese foundation, which funds for example many development projects and enhances the issues of international maritime education, e.g. by acting as a main financer of IAMU and by supporting the World Maritime University in Malmö. More information  on the home pages of the Nippon Foundation.

Maritime programmes at SAMK