The British University in Dubai dedicates more than Dhs3m to research funding

In a recent initiative, the University council of the postgraduate, research-based institution dedicated a total of more than Dhs3m in the form of materials, equipment and academic staff time. Such investments have ensured, in a short space of time, the emergence of BUiD as a leader in research and research-based education, in the UAE and its surrounding region alike.

The latest round of investment enables BUiD staff to dedicate at least 40 percent of their time toward research activities, bringing teaching hours well below the national average and into line with the typical teaching loads at leading research-based universities in the United States and the UK. Staff will be guaranteed ample time to explore research activities, ensuring opportunities to shift teaching in the direction of cutting-edge knowledge and technologies.

"The initiative provides internal seed funding for a variety of research projects, focussed on the challenges specific to the UAE and the region," said Dr. Abdullah Alshamsi, Vice-Chancellor, The British University in Dubai. "Research funding remains scarce in the UAE, in comparison to developed economies: BUiD's initiative is a step towards changing this," he added.

A high profile example of the benefits of such funding is a Faculty of Education project which explores the Use of English as a Lingua Franca in the UAE. The ambition of this undertaking is matched by the Faculty of Business, one of whose projects plans to analyse capital budgeting techniques in the GCC region. In parallel, other researchers in the Faculty will be evaluating the performance of quota-based employment policies in the GCC, notably Emiratisation.

This aggressive pursuit of new knowledge will be matched by work on the development of new technologies. A project at the Faculty of Engineering will initiate experimental tests on and evaluation of solar photovoltaic (PV) cells under UAE conditions. At the Faculty of Informatics, researchers on computational language processing will explore Arabic lexical error diagnosis of language learners in computer-based language tutoring systems.

Taken together, the sheer breadth and depth of the latest round of BUiD research investment signals a significant contribution to the future development of the University and its contribution to national and regional development.