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Catholic University of the Sacred Heart - Piacenza campus
Founded in Milan in 1921 by Agostino Gemelli, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore – Unicatt (Catholic University of the Sacred Heart ) operates in five locations: Milan, Rome, Brescia, Piacenza and Cremona.
Via Emilia Parmense
,
84
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29122
Piacenza
UniCatt is the largest non-state university in Europe. It is a non-profit institution whose revenues are all reinvested in teaching, research and other activities, including economic support for low-income students. Unicatt operates in full compliance with all the regulations and provisions of the Italian university legislation and is subject to accreditation by ANVUR, the Italian Agency for the Evaluation of Universities and Research.
UniCatt hosts 12 faculties with over 40,000 students enrolled (including 27,000 FTE students). It offers 43 Bachelor's Degree courses, seven single-cycle Master's Degrees, 48 Master's Degree courses, more than 140 Professional Master Programmes, 47 Specialisation Schools, and 8 Higher Education Schools. The educational offer also includes 24 Degree Programmes and 16 Professional Master Programmes delivered in English.
UniCatt undertakes an intense research activity, with 5674 publications registered in 2020 and 3657 articles published by scientific journals in all the disciplines covered by the educational offer. Between 2016 and 2020, the SciVal database (Scopus) listed 15,060 publications by Unicatt researchers that received 246,401 mentions, with a citation index ('Field-weighted citation impact') of 1.70, higher than the national average.
UniCatt in the agri-food sector
The Unicatt branch of Piacenza, with its Faculty of Agricultural, Food and Environmental Sciences founded in 1953, is among the most active non-state universities in the agri-food sector at the European level, with over 300 publications per year.
This Unicatt faculty can rely on over 200 researchers who operate in this field across the different departments and research centres, thus allowing the university to attract numerous competitive and private funds in the agri-food sector.
As such, Unicatt has extensive experience in research projects funded at the European and national levels, with over 100 grants (FP7, H2020, JPI, LIFE, PRIMA, and many other national and regional projects). In particular, Unicatt has received funding from competitive tenders pertaining to FoodEr topics for approximately 8.2 million euros over the past five years.
Sectors such as food safety, sustainability and circular economy, the valorisation of waste biomass, the wine industry or the production of goods of animal origin are particularly relevant for Unicatt. The faculty is involved in numerous training, research and innovation projects, initiatives and collaborations.
