'In years to come our potential can be realized even more fully'

After months of meticulous planning, the UT's 50th anniversary got extensively celebrated in Enschede's Wilmink theater yesterday.

During his opening speech, rector magnificus Professor Brinksma first pointed to the fact that fifty is an impressive age to reach. 'But where reaching fifty can be a somewhat sad occasion for people, signaling that the first halves of their lives are well over, they same thus not hold for universities, fortunately' he added, after which he reflected on how the UT had changed in 50 years, going from just 'an experiment in the woods' to becoming the first Dutch campus university. The rector also made it clear that the UT would apply its gained wisdom to further grow and deliver on its slogan: 'high tech, human touch', by aptly combing science with social sciences insights.

Following the rector's words, to which he often added some humorous comments, two prizes were awarded: a regional prize for the best PhD thesis (at €5000), which was awarded to Martin Jurna (MESA+), and the Professor de Winterprize (€2500). Winner of the latter prize - awarded to females with a high potential- was Russian Nelly Litvak for her path-breaking research on algorithms for complex networks, like the Google Page rank algorithm used to rank results in Google.

After a brief musical interlude by the Dutch Symphonic Orchestra, Her Majesty of the Netherlands Queen Beatrix to entered the room, to be seated in between Enschede's major and UT's Anne Flierman. Subsequently, the queen and the audience were shown a brief film on the history of the UT, in which, as it turned out, the royal Dutch family featured rather prominently: from the UT's formal opening by the late princess Juliana to the recent opening of the new one by Crown prince Willem-Alexander.

The film also showed how the UT (which was initially a University of Applied sciences) was deeply rooted in the Twente region, which demanded in the early sixties -when recession had hit the region hard- from the national government in the Hague 'the right to higher education'. It was furthermore detailed how, determined not just to be a copy of already existing universities like Leiden University, Twente came up with the innovative concept of a campus university, while it was also the first university in the Netherlands to actively link science to entrepreneurship alongside an innovative focus on the social sciences as an important addition to 'pure' science.

During a subsequent speech entitled 'function follows shape', Professor Van Bitterswijk, scientific director of MIRA informed the audience on the possibilities and developments in the area of regenerative medicine. Van Bitterswijk detailed how 'function follows shape' when tissue stem cells take on different capacities or compositions according to their placement in different pre-set shapes. Insights into these processes can significantly facilitate medical procedures, for example in the area of bone replacement.

After a spectacular surprise laser show centered around the planned construction of a Centre for Medical Imaging on campus, the remainder of the program was devoted to the awarding of four honorary doctorates: to Professor Helga Nowotny, Professor Wolfgang Knoll, Mr Henri Termeer and (Mythbuster) Adam Savage. Where the two first doctorates were mostly awarded on basis of academic merits, Termeer received his highly successful entrepreneurship in biotechnology and for focusing on neglected diseases like malaria. Savage received the doctorate thanks to his Mythbusters show, which helped to 'greatly popularise science, making it accessible to millions of TV viewers all over the world'. He accepted to doctorate also on behalf of show co-presenter Jamie Hyneman, who thanked the UT in a short video message.