More than 140 students are participating in the 2012 edition of the HydroEurope project. They are divided into ten international teams and after 3 months of online work, they will meet for 2 weeks of intensive seminars from February 13 to February 25, 2012, at the Polytech Nice Sophia school site in Sophia Antipolis.
These students specializing in Water Engineering come from the six major European universities partnering with the University of Nice for this program:
- Brandenburg University of Technology in Cottbus (Germany)
- Budapest University of Technology and Economics (Hungary)
- Polytechnic University of Catalonia (Spain)
- Newcastle University (United Kingdom)
- Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (Switzerland)
- Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium)
The guidance is provided by about thirty recognized experts from these universities. These seven universities host foreign students within the Erasmus program, facilitating the meeting of the 37 nationalities represented this year in Nice.
A Supported and Rewarded Project
In 2002, the European Commission granted its support to the international educational project HydroEurope within the Erasmus program. This support has been renewed every year since and ranks in the top 3 of actions funded by the European Commission. Additionally, numerous international companies in the water sector support this project, such as Suez Environnement, DHI, and Halcrow (funding and provision of software tools – €100k/year).
This international collaboration has earned Polytech’Nice-Sophia several awards in recent years, including the Grand Prix for International Development as part of the 2011 Awards of Major Engineering Schools and the MCE Award 2011 in the “International Relations” category.
A Concrete Issue: The 1994 Var Flood
The HydroEurope program, initiated in 2000, is an intensive program dedicated to collaborative engineering in the field of water management and hydroinformatics. The project focuses on managing the Var floods by analyzing data from the 1994 Var flood and its catastrophic consequences. Studies conducted during the HydroEurope project aim to model the flood and propose engineering solutions to mitigate the damage caused by these exceptional events. This project thus provides students with the opportunity to gain a unique international experience.
