University of Maragheh

The University of Maragheh is a public institution located in the ancient city of Maragheh in the Iranian province of East Azerbaijan, about 50 miles from the city of Tabriz. It was formed in 2009.

It was built on foundations from agricultural education. The Agricultural College of Maragheh began life in 1987 under the auspices of the University of Tabriz, and remained part of it until attaining Higher Education Centre status in 2005.

Initially formed from faculties of agriculture and of basic science, it subsequently added engineering and then human sciences in 2010. Agriculture incorporates horticulture, crop production, soil science, plant protection and agronomy and plant breeding.

Engineering has civil and materials departments while basic science covers maths, physics, chemistry and cell and molecular biology. Originally including geography, urban planning and law, human sciences has since added psychology and English language.

The campus is just outside the largely Azeri-speaking city noted for its five surviving 12th Century tomb towers and for a remarkable heritage in astronomy. This ties in with the proposed incorporation of the modern Astronomy Research Centre.

The Observatory, established in Maragheh in 1259, and the ruins excavated in the 1970s, has been called "a unique place in the history of astronomy" as harbinger of "a new wave of scientific activities in the Islamic World in the mid 13th Century" and is reckoned to have had a library of 40,000 books.

Modern scientific achievements at the university include the development of nano-sensors capable of detecting prostate cancer within 12 minutes through the analysis of blood samples and a microbiologist’s discovery that his own urine was a potential source of yeast.