On Wednesday, 8 April, the Academic Senate of the University of Veterinary and Pharmaceutical Sciences Brno (UVPS) approved the transfer of the UVPS Faculty of Pharmacy to Masaryk University as of 30 June 2020. The MUNI senators will discuss the acquisition of the new faculty in their session on 4 May. Prior to this, the senates of both universities had already approved the contracts that set out the details of the transfer.
Current students of the Faculty of Pharmacy will continue with their studies at the new MU faculty, which will also retain all the staff currently employed at the UVPS faculty. For the time being, classes will continue to be held at the UVPS. For more information, please go to www.muni.cz/farmacie (in Czech).
“I started discussions on transferring the Faculty of Pharmacy to our university with the rector of the UVPS as soon as I took office. The latest events reaffirmed what we had thought for a long time, that we need to develop close ties between pharmacy, medicine and other disciplines studied at our university, both in education and in research,” says MU Rector Martin Bareš.
UVPS Rector Alois Nečas agrees: “In 1991, UVPS Brno accepted the request to reinstate a pharmaceutical faculty in Brno. Over the past 29 years, we have been able to establish a fully-fledged and well-regarded Faculty of Pharmacy. We have now decided to support the transfer of pharmaceutical education to Masaryk University to satisfy the public need for top-level pharmaceutical education in the Czech Republic. Going forward, this will require merging the resources of pharmacy and human medicine.
From 1 July 2020, both employees and current students of the Faculty of Pharmacy will continue with their jobs and studies at the new MU faculty. The classes will continue to be held at UVPS premises under a lease agreement with Masaryk University. In the future, the faculty should become part of the University Campus Bohunice.
There will be very little disruption to this year’s applicants and future first-year students of the Faculty of Pharmacy. This year’s admission procedure will be organised by the UVPS Faculty of Pharmacy and successful applicants will be admitted to the MU Faculty of Pharmacy, which is scheduled to be created as of 1 July 2020. Current students of the faculty will become students of MU as though their study programme never changed, which means that the transfer will not affect any accommodation and other grants and that students will not incur any fees for prolonged studies.
The transfer will provide current MU students and employees with the opportunity for closer collaboration with their new colleagues and fellow students specialising in pharmacy. Since the Faculty of Pharmacy was previously part of Masaryk University between 1952 and 1960, it will become the sixth oldest faculty of the university. Therefore, the most recently established Faculty of Sports Studies will remain the youngest MU faculty but will become the tenth one.
The MU Faculty of Pharmacy was closed down in 1960 by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, the then-leading political body, and merged with the existing Faculty of Pharmacy in Bratislava. The faculty was re-established in 1991 as part of the Veterinary University, now called the University of Veterinary and Pharmaceutical Sciences Brno.