STORY: Olin College and Kyiv School of Economics are shortlisted for PIEoneer Awards Partnership of the Year
Olin College of Engineering and Kyiv School of Economics have been shortlisted as a finalist for the 2026 PIEoneer Awards Partnership of the Year.
For a decade, the PIEoneer Awards have stood at the forefront of international education, celebrating the people and organizations transforming the sector. The winners will be announced at the awards ceremony, described as the ‘Oscars of international education,’ on Friday, September 4, 2026 at London's Guildhall.
Olin College and KSE have been selected as a finalist for the 2026 PIEoneer Awards Partnership of the Year.
About the Partnership
In 2025, the two institutions announced a multi-year intensive partnership to support the launch of a new undergraduate engineering program in Ukraine. Since then, faculty, staff and students from both colleges have worked to co-create a new-model undergraduate engineering program focused on human flourishing in rebuilding Ukraine’s future.
The partnership emphasizes creative, collaborative culture as much as curricular content, preparing a first cohort of change-oriented engineering students in a country designing its future even as it fights for survival.
KSE’s new Delta Engineering program integrates technical depth with interdisciplinary, human-centered design, entrepreneurship and hands-on collaborative experience—an engineering education oriented toward peace, recovery and human flourishing. Its name symbolizes the change its students embody while also honoring Daria Lopatina (call name “Delta”), a 19-year-old KSE student killed in action as a combat engineer defending Ukraine.
Together, Olin and KSE have achieved a shared curricular vision and recruited a founding cohort of faculty and students for an intensive year-long co-design process, mirroring Olin’s own history and empowering faculty and students to create meaningful institutional change.
Students, faculty and staff from Olin College of Engineering and Kyiv School of Economics pose for a group photo.
About Olin and KSE
Kyiv School of Economics and Olin College of Engineering are both young institutions, agile and light-footed, that have blazed new trails in higher education in their respective countries.
KSE (founded 1996) is laying the intellectual foundation for a strong and innovative economy and resilient society. While the university’s name commemorates its original focus on economics, KSE has expanded to other disciplines critical to Ukraine’s future: social sciences, public policy, business, law, and quantitative and technical fields including computer science, pure and applied mathematics—-and now engineering. While nearly all Ukrainian universities have diminished in recent years (even before Russia’s full-scale invasion), KSE has grown rapidly and responded creatively to the profound challenges currently facing Ukraine.
Olin (founded 1997) is a renowned leader in transforming engineering education through its innovative project-based curriculum focused on real-world engineering and design, teamwork and entrepreneurship, integrated with liberal arts. Olin’s unique approach instills passion and ignites innovation, preparing students to envision, create, and deliver products, services, and systems that improve people’s lives around the world. Graduates are explorers and creators who design their own paths. Olin is revolutionizing the way undergraduate engineers learn and create knowledge.