King Abdullah University of Science and Technology Goes the Next Step. (January 15, 2008)

In June last year TFW reported that the ruler of Saudi Arabia, King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz had set aside US$10 billion as an endowment for the setting up of KAUST, the

 King Abdullah University of Science and Technology. At that time the administrator  hoped to have its founding president installed by the beginning of next year.

Yesterday the university announced the appointment of Choon Fong Shih, currently vice-chancellor of the National University of Singapore, as its foundation president. He will take up his new position in December.

As vice-chancellor of NUS Professor Shih is considered to have transformed it into an Asian research powerhouse by hiring outstanding researchers, fostering an entrepreneurial spirit, and forming global alliances.

Rodney Clifton, a professor of mechanical engineering at Brown University, where Shih was a faculty member for 15 years before moving back to Singapore in 1996 told ScienceNow: "NUS is moving up in the world, and Shih certainly deserves some of the credit. He has a very positive vision of what's possible, and he also possesses tremendous energy."

ScienceNow reports: "[KAUST] is scheduled to open in September of 2009. Shih intends to attract faculty members with generous, guaranteed funding --'much bigger than the usual start-up package,' he says--and believes that rolling 6-year contracts will prove to be a suitable replacement for tenure. In the meantime, some 34 research teams from around the world have applied for 5-year, $5-million-a-year Global Research Partnership grants, of which five will be awarded in the first round. KAUST officials hope the program will lay the foundation for the type of partnerships that Shih nurtured at NUS."

Professor Shih steered NUS down the path of narrow specialisation prioritised by the Singaporean government thereby creating centres of excellence. He plans to follow a similar pattern at KAUST.

William Schowalter, an emeritus professor of chemical engineering at Princeton University and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, who has worked as senior adviser to Professor Shih for the past 6 years says: "He's been in phase with what the country wants to do in science and technology, and it's paid off; If anybody can make KAUST work, he can."

It remains to be seen if such an approach, vastly different from that of Caltech or MIT, is the sensible way for KAUST to go and  Richard Sykes, rector of Imperial College London and another made the point: "I don't think that it'll be too difficult to get good people to come for a short time. The issue will be, 'Can you sustain the quality over time?'"