The Higher Education Commission (HEC) of Pakistan has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the University of New Mexico (UNM), USA for a scholarship program relating to higher studies of university teachers/scholars of Pakistan.
Initially, the School of Engineering (SOE) at UNM would enroll Pakistani candidates for MS program, which would lead to PhD programs starting from 2013. However, the officials at UNM informed that they were working on expanding the agreement to major disciplines and soon the expanded MOU would be sent to HEC.
UNM is a leading public sector higher education institution located at Albuquerque New Mexico in the United States. Offering a variety of programs, the UNM is ranked amongst the best universities of the world. The HEC would provide scholarships to eligible Pakistani candidates for higher studies in the university. It was hoped that this mutual cooperation would lead towards fruitful results in the field of higher education.
Under various scholarship schemes, HEC had awarded more than 6,000 foreign scholarships to Pakistani scholars for undertaking higher education studies and research at the best and renowned institutions of 37 academically advanced countries. These foreign scholarships had been awarded in all the major disciplines including physical sciences, agriculture and veterinary sciences, biological and medical sciences, social sciences, management sciences and engineering. After the successful completion of their studies, previous scholars had returned to Pakistan to apply their knowledge and expertise to address the various socio-economic problems being faced by the country.
These scholars had also been contributing in assisting “Universities building economies, leadership and communities”. The Commission was not only striving to provide opportunities to aspiring scholars to pursue higher education, both at domestic and international levels, it had also devised a special program, “Interim Placement of Fresh PhDs” for facilitating the placement of these scholars at academic and research institutions. This had come about due to the approach of HEC to ensure proper utilization of the manpower being trained through investments in the scholarship programs.
HEC Interim Placement of fresh PhDs program was based on a two-pronged approach, which primarily provided the lucrative avenues of employment to the fresh PhD professionals and secondly it met the faculty requirement of public and private sector universities / DAIs for ensuring quality teaching and research.
All IPFP awardees were also provided with a Rs. 0.5 million as a start up research grant to initiate a feasible research project at his/her host university, upon joining the institutions. The on-going regular program was open to all fields. The placed scholars had found this program quite useful and effective and termed it quite helpful in countering the brain drain at the national level. Through this innovative program, more than a 1,000 Pakistani PhDs, belonging to diversified fields, had been successfully placed as Assistant Professors at the leading universities across the country.
In addition, the Pakistani researchers had been facilitated in creating linkages with their counterparts in every leading university of the world in the United States (US), United Kingdom (UK), China, Germany, France, Australia, Korea and other countries.
HEC signs MoU with University of New Mexico for scholarship programme
