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Another foreign faculty member leaves Russia’s self-styled Silicon Valley graduate school

Source: RBC

Edward Crawley is leaving his post as president of the Skolkovo Institute for Science and Technology (Skoltech) in December. Crawley, who is an American aerospace engineer, moves to a position at MIT. He has not disclosed the reasons for his resignation.

According to the Vice President of the institute, Crawley is leaving because his contract will be up at the end of the year. According to sources from Skoltech speaking with Russian newspaper RBC, Crawley had not worked actively enough. “We understand that it is difficult to work under the circumstances of sanctions, but we would have like Skoltech to develop better,” the source told RBC.

Crawley was invited to Russia by the Skolkovo Foundation in August 2011. In his [goodbye] letter addressed to his colleagues, Crawley recalls that at that time there was “practically” nothing at Skoltech: “No departments, no professors, not even a website.”

RBC

Skoltech is a graduate school set up by the state-owned Skolkovo Foundation, known as Moscow’s self-styled “Silicon Valley.” Skoltech was founded in 2011 as a partner institution of MIT (which earned $300 million for the partner agreement). The aim of the graduate school was to attract domestic and foreign talent into the fields of science and technology, in order to drive Russia’s economic modernization. Edward Crawley, an MIT professor, was the first president of the institute.

Several foreign faculty members have recently left Skoltech. Dutch professor Anton Berns left his Skoltech stem-cell research job after Flight MH17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine in 2014. Zafer Gürdal, head of the Skoltech Center for Advanced Structures, Processes, and Engineered Materials, left his position in the spring of 2015. In the summer of 2015, Raj Rajagopalan left his post as Skoltech provost.

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