1. Probably this is my last posting for the month of March as I'll leave for Hong Kong on Tuesday 30th to attend WWF Asia-Pacific Chair meeting. Incidently I just came back from Port Dickson where we did the 2009 research project appraisal. This is an annual affair, I missed the last year's evaluation at Seremban and I decided to attend this one.
2. UKM has some 7-8 research niches such as medical and health science research, regional sustainable heritage research, exploring biodiversity & biotechnology, ICT, Climate change, nanotechnology, renewable energy etc. I belong to niche on regional sustainable heritage which is headed by Lestari's Director Prof. Mazlin Mokhtar.
3. Overall the majority of niches, and the majority of clusters within the respective niche and the majority of research groups within the cluster did well. There was an improvement when compared using the same indicators to those of 2008. I always believe the majority of researchers worked very hard to fulfill the agreed targets, except for a few. Many research groups scored the maximum 5 when calculated using the inputs and outputs. In other words they received more than optimum grants, published more papers in journals, had more PhD and MS students graduated, did great networking etc.
4. The groups within the medical and health science niche and exploring biodiversity and biotechnology did well but not as good as the other niches. The reasons given was that research in these fields are more competitive and they need a longer duration to achieve. These are fair comments and the medical researchers need to do their ward rounds as well and be on-calls. Research in molecular biology in particular is highly competitive ....by the time they had finished a couple of experiments their counterparts in Europe, Japan and US had already published their papers!
5. The number of patents are not easy to come by ....the number filed took a long period of time to produce results. The number of books based on R & D is also small. Talking about the number of papers published in journal I must say UKM is still far behind. It is now 0.8 per person, and it was 0.2 in 2007. Mind you there are hundreds of staffs are devoid of research grants and they did not publish in journals. I presumed there are also hundreds who didn't do research at all. Of course there are many who are prolific, producing more than 10-15 each. Congratulations to these carriers or surrogates of other junior staffs.
6. I foresee the year 2010 evaluation in march 2011 will see another incremental progress. Cheers
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