The Erasmus Mundus Master's Program in Geospatial Technologies has secured consecutive European funding of over €3.5 million under the Erasmus Mundus Joint Masters 2025 call. This support will enable the program, launched in 2007, to continue its path of excellence, establishing itself as one of the pioneering and longest-standing Erasmus Mundus programs in terms of continuous EU funding.
Developed in partnership by three prestigious European institutions – the Institute for Geoinformatics (ifgi) at the University of Münster (Germany), the GEOTEC research group at the Institute of New Imaging Technologies (INIT) of the Universitat Jaume I of Castellón (Spain), and the NOVA Information Management School (NOVA IMS) at the Universidade NOVA de Lisboa (Portugal) – the program offers a unique interdisciplinary education. The institutions combine internationally recognized expertise in geoinformatics, geographic information science, computer science, advanced analytics, data science, remote sensing, and innovative geospatial technologies, allowing students to study in three different countries.
Since its inception, EU investment has funded the training of over 400 students and professionals from 85 countries, creating an international community of specialists active in academia, government, business, and civil society. A significant portion of this funding is allocated to scholarships for international students, promoting equity and academic excellence.
The new funding is a recognition of the program's academic excellence and its proven ability to train highly qualified professionals capable of facing complex global challenges through geospatial knowledge and technologies. It establishes a solid foundation for the master's next phase of development, ensuring that new generations of talented students worldwide continue to access high-quality, internationally oriented education in a strategic field.
Fillipe Feitosa, program coordinator at the University of Münster, highlights future challenges: "The amount of geospatial and Earth Observation data currently available continues to grow rapidly, but its value to society depends on our ability to transform it into actionable knowledge. Artificial Intelligence, and particularly GeoAI, is changing how complex spatial and temporal data are analyzed, and employers increasingly seek professionals who combine geospatial thinking with machine learning, large-scale language models, cloud computing, and Earth Observation data analysis. Few educational programs integrate these skills coherently. In the coming years, our challenge will be to keep the joint curriculum aligned with this pace of transformation across three universities and rethink how we teach and assess students in a reality where AI tools are part of their daily lives."
Ana Cristina Costa, coordinator at NOVA IMS, adds: "Our goal is to train graduates capable of applying these technologies critically and responsibly to solve real-world challenges, contributing to a more sustainable and resilient society."
