UAE universities urged to join forces

Research capacity and innovation capacity hampered by not collaborating to boost a culture of academia.

DUBAI // Academics say more collaboration is needed between universities if the country is to move forward its research capacity and boost innovation.

Stephen Gill came to the UAE 10 years ago as one of the first teachers at the Heriot-Watt University Dubai as the academic head of the school of mathematical and computer sciences.

The Scottish university’s UAE arm was originally in rented office space in Dubai International Academic City (Diac) with only 120 students. It has since grown to accommodate 4,000 students in its state-of-the-art campus.

“There needs to be more collaboration between universities here,” he said. “It’s not happened a lot in the past but we’re getting better at collaboration now. There wasn’t that culture of academia when I first arrived.”

Recently, the university agreed to a partnership with the University of Sharjah to collaborate on research and share facilities, such as laboratories.

A research steering committee has also recently been established in Diac to further cooperation between institutions.

“It’s a movement in the right direction,” said Mr Gill. “We’ve also appointed a director of research in computer science to pursue research. That will hopefully bring more institutions and academics together.”

Prof Ammar Kaka, campus head for Heriot-Watt in Dubai, has been with the institution since 2008 and has been at the forefront of bringing PhD programmes to the school.

He hoped the steering committee would help move things forward. “Academics network and collaborate all the time,” he said. “If you were in the UK it would be part of the job to be talking to other colleagues in your research area.

“Every university has maybe one or two people in a speciality, but if they want to collaborate they have to go out of the institution. You need to have communities of researchers and to build these communities you need other institutions.”

Ten students at Heriot-Watt are currently studying for their PhDs. However, only 11 Ministry of Higher Education accredited universities offer PhD programmes.

In October, Sultan Al Mansouri, the Minister of Economy, told the World Economic Forum global summit in Abu Dhabi that innovation was projected to account for at least 5 per cent of the country’s GDP by 2021. “Maybe seven per cent of GPD if we push harder,” he said.

Prof Tod Laursen, president of Khalifa University in Abu Dhabi, agreed that collaboration was vital. He has worked to achieve this with the University Leadership Council, which includes institutions such as the Masdar Institute, UAE University and the American University of Sharjah, as well as ACE4s, a centre of excellence for energy efficient electronics systems.

It is led jointly by Khalifa University and Masdar, where eight universities in the UAE and abroad are involved in 15 research tasks.

“All universities in the UAE are small when considered on a world scale, so collaboration between them and with others is important to make real effect on grand challenge problems,” said Prof Laursen.

“Research productivity is really all about collaboration. The trend in peer reviewed publications in the past 20 or 30 years has clearly been away from single-authored scholarship and towards collaboratively authored research.”​