THE MARIANO Marcos State University and the DroneAcharya Aerial Innovations Ltd. joined forces to establish a drone school.

A memorandum of understanding was signed by MMSU President Shirley Agrupis and DAIL Founder and Managing Director Prateek Srivastava.

Through the five-year agreement, the two institutions will offer drone and geographic information system-related courses, trainings and workshops.

MMSU will provide classrooms and office spaces and give access to hardware, software, and other tangible resources for the development of unmanned aerial vehicles.

DAIL, meanwhile, will deliver the content and curriculum of the courses and grant MMSU students and faculty access to drones and other applications.

It will also provide at least four internships to junior and senior college students every year.

The signing ceremony coincided with the two-day Coastal Engineering Summit organized by the Coastal Engineering Research Center and the Department of Science and Technology.

Agrupis is hopeful that the collaboration will capacitate faculty and researchers in coastal engineering, disaster risk assessment, and coastal flood modeling.

“May this partnership be beneficial to students in the fields of agriculture, engineering, geoinformatics, and data science for internships and future job opportunities,” she said.

The partnership is also expected to support the MMSU-based COASTER Center as it ventures on the modern-day methods of data-gathering and decision-making in the field of coastal engineering, the school said.

Established in 2017, DAIL is an India-based company that specializes in geospatial data application Karnataka State Electronics Development Corporation Limited. It aims to train the next generation to become extremely skilled in using unmanned aerial vehicles, and to become a major player in the drone industry in India.