Singaporean magazine El Sevier has praised the progress Qatar is seeing in the scientific and education field, highlighting in particular the flourishing scientific research in the country.
The magazine said yesterday it conducted an analysis on the research statistics of 77 countries. One of the findings was that many more researchers are moving to Qatar (18%) than out of the country (7%), resulting in a net researcher inflow of 11%.
The numbers make Qatar “a top research destination,” the article said.
The rest of the articles examined the reasons behind that development. One of the reasons it found was the increased investment in scientific research, which now stands at $100mn a year. Qatar also spends 2.8% of its GDP on scientific research.
The magazine said it expected Qatar to progress even more in that field over the next 20 years as it attracts more and more top researchers.
The magazine also conducted two interviews with three researchers based in Qatar.
The first was with Omar el-Agnaf. The researcher, originally from Libya, said that the vision of Qatar was very attractive to him. He is a professor of Life Sciences in the College of Science and Engineering at Hamad bin Khalifa University and new acting executive director of Qatar Biomedical Research Institute (QBRI). His research focuses on neurodegenerative diseases, specifically Parkinson’s disease.
Senior scientist at the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) of Hamad bin Khalifa University Dr Xiaosong Ma said Qatar is developing fast. “Thanks to government investment and good infrastructure researchers from around the world can find state-of-the-art facilities and institutions to work at”.
She is working on distributed systems; she explores how industry can use powerful machines better, scheduling tasks to make everything run more efficiently.
The third interview was with Hareb al-Jabri, who is manager of the Algal Technologies Programme at Qatar University, where he supervises an international team of researchers from India, Holland, Morocco, Tunisia, Jordan, the Palestinian territories, Bangladesh, and Qatar. He believes this investment has improved Qatar’s reputation, attracting people from overseas. He said that five years ago, it was difficult to order chemicals and equipment but now it’s much faster and easier.
