By Denise Marray/GT London Correspondent
The keynote speakers at the Qatar Foundation–UK Road Ahead Forum held at King’s College London on Monday gave insights into the sectors where collaboration is seen as especially desirable.
Prof Hilal Ahmed Lashuel, executive director, Qatar Biomedical Research Institute, said: “Partnership is critical because it allows us to leverage the advances that are made, accelerate the transfer of technology and knowhow, and apply this to locally relevant challenges today.
“We don’t want to start from zero; we want to say ‘this is the point which the world has reached’, and the challenge is how to transfer it and accelerate the application of this knowledge and technology for the benefit of Qatari society.
“In the R&D community we are very keen to balance the long-term goals with short-term gains because the support of the public and policy makers is crucial for the sustainability of the development of R&D.”
He cited collaborations with Imperial College on the genetic molecular basis of diabetes and the national bio bank as examples of important areas of research that will have a direct and tangible benefit to Qatar.
“Qatar is very committed to a leadership position in personalised healthcare. This is an area where we would like to explore more opportunities for collaboration. It is an area where we believe Qatar will have a true competitive edge,” he said.
Dr Ahmed Elmagarmid, executive director, Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI), spoke about the key areas of interest for QCRI.
“We are looking to co-operate with UK-based institutions, research and universities, in all areas of our focus: cyber security, computational linguistics, data analytics, information retrieval. Social computing is very big for us.”
Dr Mohammad Khaleel, executive director, Qatar Environment and Energy Research Institute, commented: “What we are looking for at this event is to find true partnerships to buy down scientific, technical and deployment risks associated with two grand challenges that we have in Qatar. One is water security grand challenge; we depend a lot solely on water from desalination so we want to be able to reduce the energy usage in desalination, ensure that the water we have in the Gulf is of high quality and also ensure that we have strategic reserves for water in the ground. The other aspect is part of our diversification of the energy chain in Qatar. Aside from oil and gas, we are blessed by having a lot of solar energy so we are focusing on solar PV energy storage technologies and how to create a smart grid.
“We want to commercialise our technologies and be a supplier of technologies. We need to create SMEs; to do it we need to partner with others to buy down the risks.”
Dr Mounir Hamdi, dean, College of Science, Engineering and Technology, Hamad Bin Khalifa University observed: “We are interested in collaboration at educational programme levels and research levels. We are launching new colleges and programmes so we wanted to see what opportunities we can grasp for collaboration with UK universities mainly at Masters and PhD level. Some of these people are exploring the idea of ‘split’ degrees, also known as ‘dual’ degrees whereby a student would undertake a programme which is delivered by two institutions. A lot of universities are doing this because it is very beneficial to the students.”
Martin Hope, country director, British Council, Qatar, observed: “We have seen how much Qatar has invested already, and plans to invest in diversification. The commitment of the senior leadership in Qatar to forging partnerships to work on the grand challenges is clear for all to see. I think it looks like investment is there for the long term. What impresses me is the long term vision – the 2030 Vision. My job is to forge partnerships between the two countries; that makes it easier to me to speak to UK institutions, because I can give a consistent message.”
Dominic McAllister, counsellor, science and innovation, UK Science and Innovation Network, British embassy in Doha, said: “Once you start getting a momentum and people see the value of it, it starts to flow. Events like this create awareness of what the Qatar National Research Strategy is trying to achieve and encourage more UK universities to engage.”
Daniel Shah, assistant director, policy, UK Higher Education International Unit, said: “It would be positive to get more students from the UK to undertake part of their degree or research in Qatar or other countries in the Gulf. This would contribute to their own learning about how to collaborate in global teams to address scientific challenges which are not only multi-disciplinary but always going to be multi-national in the future because of the scale of the intellectual resources that need to be deployed to
address them.”
Dr Joanna Newman, vice-principal (international), King’s College London, said: “We are encouraging our nine faculties to become involved through both the Qatar National Research Fund and the Qatar Foundation.
“In the areas of energy, water and cyber security, we have common interests in finding new
research solutions.
“The nature of research is now international; it is impossible to conceive of any project that doesn’t have international
partners involved in some way.”


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