Safety science is a discipline in which engineering, research and development tasks motivated by real needs, can be realized through the high-level integrated cultivation of several scientific disciplines. The aim of the new scientific results generated during the research is to ensure that a critical system behaves in the desired manner, even in the event of failure of system elements, external disturbances, or dysfunctional cooperation of elements.
Safety science, as a research field, deals with topics that are far removed from each other in terms of traditional scientific classification, such as accident prevention, handling of hazardous materials, occupational hygiene, occupational safety and ergonomics, operation and maintenance, noise protection, risk assessment and risk management, and the economic and business aspects of safety. The range of scientists researching and publishing in this field ranges from psychologists, chemical engineers, mechanical and electrical engineers, to military scientists. Physics, manufacturing technology, social and political phenomena, management sciences, control theory, law, business sciences, and research into human behavior are all included.
The interpretation of security has become a serious social, economic, and political factor today. At the international level, NATO and the European Union have also developed their related concepts and regulatory ideas. Today, maintaining safe living and working conditions and sustainable security have also become a matter of state governance. In security science – in addition to the general need for universal scientific knowledge – as a result of this paradigm shift, new, special research needs have also emerged, and these have also appeared in the reflection of the international scientific community. The scientific research and professional public life system provides a natural framework for this.
Higher education institutions have made a significant contribution to the development of security science worldwide. They recognized in time that security can only be addressed in a complex manner, and that natural needs and expectations can only be met by integrating knowledge. To this end, the relevant disciplines need to be integrated. This is also reflected in the security engineering master’s and doctoral programs of the relevant institutions, as shown by some international examples below:
The reflection of the relevant actors in Hungarian higher education was not so quick: a doctoral program in security science does not yet exist in any institution. Therefore, it is clearly justified, and even necessary – taking into account international trends and the economic and social processes of our country – for Óbuda University, which is most involved in the training of security engineers, to respond to the paradigm shift and, at a training level exceeding the bachelor’s and master’s degrees in security engineering, to launch a training program for scientists capable of creatively researching complex security problems, the first in Hungary.
TheDoctoral School for Safety and Security Sciences aims to train technical and scientific researchers who are able to go beyond the traditional, disciplinary approach and, through the synergistic and creative application of the acquired knowledge, are able to independently solve research and development tasks based on real industrial needs. In this way, the boundary between previously sharply separated disciplines is blurred, and the project-oriented approach required for solving practical tasks generates synergies between disciplines, and a novel security science “knowledge polygon” is formed.
The core members of the Doctoral School have already collaborated significantly in their research. At the same time, one of the fundamental goals of the Doctoral School is that the core members, supervisors, lecturers and guest lecturers not only strengthen their own research topics, but also complement each other to generate new interdisciplinary research topics, and that the talented young people working on them achieve significant results by international standards.
