The ninth Qatar National Research Fund (QNRF) Annual Forum has announced the awardees of its several programs and highlighted the impact of ongoing projects at an event at the Qatar National Convention Centre. Also the Texas A&M University at Qatar was awarded the Best Research Office of the Year Award 2016 for its outstanding projects.
Dr Hamad Al Ibrahim as Executive Vice-President of Research and Development at Qatar Foundation together with other officials presented the award to Dr Cesar O Malave, Dean of Texas A&M University at Qatar.
In the opening remarks at the event, Dr Al Ibrahim highlighted the new concept of co-funding which stimulates the creation of partnerships between the academic sector and the commercial end-users of research, and promoting a culture of public-private partnership in Qatar.
He said that commercial stakeholders, industry and the government have shown a promising indication of strong interest by co-funding the proposals.
“In this tenth cycle we introduced co-funding by stakeholders. More than 50 percent of the submitted proposals has co-funding as total amount of $16m,” Dr Al Ibrahim said.
The forum also saw the awarding QNRF’s funding programs. It included the tenth cycle of the National Priorities Research Program (NPRP 10), the second cycle of the Path towards Personalized Medicine (PPM2), second cycle of the OSRA (OSRA2), held in collaboration with Doha International Family Institute and the third cycle of the Postdoctoral Research Award (PDRA3).
During the forum Dr Abdul Sattar Al Taie, Executive Director, QNRF, in his presentation on ‘The Road to Impact’ said that according to a survey conducted by the QNRF has found that its work has an high impact on scientific, training and technological areas.
According to the survey, QNRF has a 78 percent of scientific impact, 50 percent impact in training and 38 percent impact in the area of technology such as creating products and innovation.
He said at present QNRF has a total of 570 active projects worth of $972m. It has 546 international collaborations and an annual increase of 28 percent of publications.