For all the modernity of the analysis services discovered at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), its president Ed Byrne notes the extra conventional aspect to educational enquiry taking place on campus.
Located an hour and a half’s drive north of Jeddah on the Red Sea coast, KAUST’s huge campus – boasting a world prime 50 supercomputer, Shaheen III; superior laboratories for photo voltaic power and desalination analysis; and two million sq. ft of analysis area – has echoes of the extra distant scholarly enclaves that will finally grow to be a few of Europe’s and America’s analysis powerhouses.
Geographically talking, Byrne admitted there was some fact to this, noting the college’s founder, the late King Abdullah, was impressed by data of the House of Wisdom based in Baghdad greater than 1,000 years in the past – the famed seat of studying that predated University of Bologna by greater than 200 years.
Yet, whereas acknowledging he’s working a “city community of scholars” related to these historic mental centres, there’s nothing insular about KAUST, he insisted, noting how it’s “very much an international community drawing great people from all over the world”.
“They are doing great science in an incredibly well-funded and well-resourced environment with access to the best core technologies and most outstanding postdocs and PhDs you’d find in any university on Earth,” mentioned Byrne, a year into his presidency of KAUST, having beforehand led main analysis universities in the UK and Australia (King’s College London and Monash University respectively).
“We are an isolated community but this is not an inward-looking community,” he continued on KAUST’s mission to produce world-leading analysis that can have quick profit for all – however notably for Saudi Arabia and the Middle East.
“It’s an outward-looking community [where] people are committed absolutely to the translation of their science in real time to the benefit of the kingdom and humanity at large,” he defined, including: “It is by far the most applied university I’ve worked at – particularly in terms of the urgency of practical, measurable outcomes that both governments and the man in the street can see and say ‘wow, isn’t that great?’”
Having led two nice civic universities with distinction, Byrne is clearly relishing the probability to focus squarely on analysis excellence and impression, relatively than participating on a number of fronts, together with educating, assist for undergraduates and regional calls for, as was anticipated at his former establishments. “This place is a scholarly nirvana,” he mentioned.
That hyperbole is maybe comprehensible given Byrne’s personal medical analysis background. To clarify additional he refers to Donald Stokes’ categorisation of research into 4 quadrants to illustrate the place he sees KAUST. In Stokes’ formulation there’s the Niels Bohr quadrant (pure primary analysis), the Thomas Edison quadrant (pure utilized analysis) and the Louis Pasteur quadrant (use-inspired primary analysis), with a remaining field described, considerably dismissively, as “tinkering”.
“You definitely need the Bohr quadrant, very pure science, and we have that in KAUST, and then there is the totally applied Edison quadrant. But most of our research is in the Pasteur quadrant,” defined Byrne, including: “This is the great science but with great application.”
“Pasteur led the discovery of immunology, of stereochemistry and multiple other things, but he applied them to immunisation, even fixing the beer at Whitbread’s Brewery. He was probably the greatest medical scientist who ever lived but he was an applied scientist. More and more scientists, I think, need to get into that mindset,” he mentioned, including “This is what KAUST is all about. People here are working on important questions.”
With international challenges associated to local weather change, clear water and meals safety notably urgent in the arid surroundings of the Middle East, KAUST’s utilized science mission has grow to be more and more extra vital, continued Byrne who makes no apologies for this focus.
“We don’t have 500 years for people to sit around and be introspective – we are not talking about ephemeral things far away on the horizon. They’re very real-time issues that need answers,” he insisted.
“Many of the greatest intellects in the world today work in universities – that’s how it should be – but there is also a responsibility on us to sort out many of the world’s ongoing problems,” he mentioned, including: “Covid showed we could do it within a very short time – things were developed at lightning speed that in the past would have taken much, much longer.”
“My strong recommendation to my university colleagues is where your institution has the capacity, you have an absolute responsibility to make sure that your institution is doing its part in solving the problems of the world – and in a timely way,” he continued.
Of course the case for funding analysis by way of taxpayers’ cash has typically been made with reference to its societal impression. Yet KAUST’s modus operandi – funding world-class analysis expertise to deal with particular societal challenges – appears more and more in tune with coverage shifts in Europe, the US and Australia the place research funding is increasingly geared towards “missions” and impact.
For some, this shift towards impact has become a fundamental matter of academic freedom given the way it impacts the proper to educate or analysis in a self-discipline, and select the route to go.
Perhaps controversially for the head of a Saudi establishment, Byrne argues educational freedom is the “underpinning pillar of successful universities everywhere, because brilliant people have to be empowered to think great thoughts and develop new things”. But this has “always been balanced increasingly by other forces”, he mentioned.
“It is important to respect Haldane principles where you fund good stuff, whatever it is, but we should also be focusing on areas of strategic importance to the nation, either regionally or nationally or internationally. This is how universities have become such large research engines,” he mentioned. That applies to schooling too, he added. “People should have the opportunity to design academic offerings but we have to meet the needs of the countries and the regions in which we operate as universities by providing the workforce they need, not just for today, but for tomorrow,” mentioned Byrne.
“If you go back hundreds of years, it may have been different when universities were communities of isolated scholars, but in my lifetime, research and higher education spending has always been constrained by national need, by funding priorities and by workforce priorities.”
As a postgraduate establishment KAUST doesn’t seem in Times Higher Education’s World University Rankings (regardless of internet hosting its World Academic Summit in October), though it does prime the THE Arab University Rankings, and it appears clear that KAUST resides up to its ambition to grow to be the “MIT or Caltech of the Middle East”. In the Nature Index rating centered on publications in prime journals it’s a prime 150 establishment – the youngest establishment to obtain this honour, other than China’s Westlake University – and a prime 100 establishment for bodily sciences and chemistry.
“We are publishing Nature and Science articles galore on an almost weekly basis,” mentioned Byrne on his establishment’s achievements.
KAUST’s sport plan is pretty easy, he added. “Recruit the best people in the world, wherever they come from. That means the largest number of faculty are from the great American universities, people who have had substantial careers in the world’s top 50 universities, but we have large numbers from Europe, Singapore, Hong Kong, China, and increasing numbers of younger faculty from Saudi,” he mentioned of his worldwide workers physique (85 per cent are from exterior the Middle East).
But expectations stay excessive, he continued. “Saudi Arabia is investing a massive amount in this institution. It needs and expects certain outcomes, not only in terms of graduating outstanding master’s and PhD students who are prepared for the future, but making sure research is done which can solve the problems the kingdom needs to help it thrive as a nation.”
“I see that as a privilege, not a difficulty,” he mentioned.