The initiative covered different areas of specialization, such as aerospace, mechanical or materials engineering. Five girls and 29 boys, all young graduates who were already Pirelli employees, were offered the opportunity to enrich their education at the start of their career path in Pirelli's Research & Development team.
The ceremony was attended by Donatella Sciuto, Rector of the Politecnico di Milano, with Andrea Casaluci, General Manager Operations at Pirelli, Piero Misani, Executive Vice President Research and Development and Cyber at Pirelli, and Davide Sala, Chief HR and Organization Officer at Pirelli.
"Training and research are prerequisites for an industrial development that looks up to the future", said Edoardo Sabbioni, Lecturer at Politecnico di Milano and Scientific Director of the Master's program. "This Master's degree fully captures these aspects by promoting transversal training and a systemic vision capable of combining the elements of tire design, production and testing through knowledge of vehicle dynamics to support their virtualization and that of materials and processes to ensure increasingly sustainable development. During the Master's program, I saw a great growth of the students that reached its best expression with the project works, through which they synthesized the skills acquired from the different learning areas and applied them critically and creatively to real-life situations, combining the backgrounds of the different members of the working groups".
Piero Misani, Executive Vice President of Research and Development and Cyber at Pirelli, said: "The complexity of the tire today is so high that it requires the highest level of specialization and the shortest possible time for experimentation. Only with always new and up-to-date digital skills can we compete in the market as protagonists. And this master's program has allowed us to deliver indispensable know-how to these 34 girls and boys who are already paying back the company by achieving important results".
The project, which is part of the long-standing collaboration between Pirelli and Politecnico di Milano aimed at generating cutting-edge technologies, focused on product expertise in the automotive sector, particularly the design and production of tires of the future and knowledge of vehicle dynamics. These are all indispensable elements for the increasingly widespread use of virtualization, which is now necessary for the development of the most innovative tires and for fruitful collaboration with automakers.
The Master's course, which saw students engaged in didactics and laboratories, was developed on 5 disciplinary modules on different thematic areas: from in-depth knowledge of the tire (forces, performance, design, testing, etc...) to "smart tire" technologies, from the study of materials to production processes, but also from an in-depth study of environmental issues to machine learning techniques or data analysis. The lectures, which were partly held inside the Learning Hub of Pirelli's new Cinturato Building in Bicocca dedicated to the group's training activities and at the R&D laboratories, then ended with a company project work elaborated in small groups of students with their tutor and a dedicated team with the aim of finding and highlighting the main connections between innovative, strategic and growth topics for the company.
The "R&D EXCELLENCE NEXT" master's degree is one example of the link between Pirelli and the university world and reinforces its open innovation model, which today sees the company working on some 65 projects with 18 universities. Collaborations with academia complement and complement Pirelli's R&D, with its 13 in-house research centers employing more than 2,000 people worldwide.
Source: La Repubblica
