Qatar Foundation hosted the annual Qatar National Research Strategy Forum 2013 in collaboration with The New York Academy of Sciences to help further the nation’s ambitious research agenda. During the forum held at Qatar National Convention Centre, six ‘grand’ challenges were identified as fundamental to advancing the Qatar National Research Strategy (QNRS).

The two-day conference gathered stakeholders from across the QNRS’s key sectors who collaborated in a series of workshops that narrowed a dozen identified grand challenges down to six. Those are the development and deployment of solar energy and production of high value hydrocarbon products, integrated mobility and road safety, integrated health management systems, desalination and water reuse, cyber security and human capacity.

During his closing remarks, Faisal M Alsuwaidi, president of research and development at Qatar Foundation, revealed next steps for overcoming the six major challenges. The coming phase of the strategy will be executed across the nation’s institutes, universities, service providers, government, industries and funders and is expected to nurture and enhance
innovative research.

“Through our efforts to refine our agenda for the Qatar National Research Strategy, the six challenges will also capture many of the other challenges we are still facing. But by selecting six, we can focus the approach in our strategy implementation and give ourselves the chance to build capacity across a number of sectors nationwide,” said Alsuwaidi.

“We will continue to pursue other challenges, but the six identified in this conference are what Qatar needs to take urgent action on and will have the most positive impact on Qatar in the near future. We also need to make sure we have both the capacity and the interest from stakeholders to undertake these challenges,” he added.

In his remarks, Michael Goldrich, executive vice president and chief operating officer of The New York Academy of Sciences, said: “This forum is the third step in the Academy’s engagement with Qatar Foundation Research and Development. We sought reactions and advice from all stakeholders to examine a set of recommendations related to the Qatar National
Research Strategy 2013.”

Qatar Foundation Research and Development will encourage input from all QNRS stakeholders in order to work towards overcoming the challenges. It will also assess human capacity and research capabilities before creating comprehensive
implementation plans.