JEDDAH: King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) has recently signed agreements with universities in countries such as Australia, Hungary, Ireland and Switzerland for the first time. These collaborations have been arranged at the faculty level. The new partners include Trinity College Dublin, Harvard University, the University of Kentucky, Clemson University in South Carolina, Australia's University of Wollongong, Ecole PolytechniqueFederale de Lausanne of Switzerland and Szechenyi Istvan University in Hungary. The existing, larger-scale partnerships including the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Stanford, Cornell, Oxford, National Taiwan University and HKUST were secured before work on building the campus began. “All early partnerships were established at the institutional level,” Dr. Mustafa Al-Ali, Global Collaborative Research (GCR) Director, said. The program attracted a strong response from faculty; ten partnerships were awarded from the 50 proposals submitted. “The proposals went through the peer review process and the selection panel evaluated them and came up with the top-ranked ones,” Dr. Al-Ali added. “As we expand our geographic distribution we are bringing research to KAUST that is of importance and will enrich the university's research agenda. What matters is that it comes from a strong group with a good reputation.” he said.
