Hussain Al Hijji (left), Vice-President, Qatar Shell Research and Technology Centre; and Dr Abdul Sattar Al Taie (right), Executive Director, Qatar National Research Fund (QNRF), with winners of 11th Annual Undergraduate Research Experience Program Compet
Teams from Qatar University (QU) and Texas A&M University at Qatar (TAMUQ) have been announced as the winners of the 11th Annual Undergraduate Research Experience Program (UREP) Competition.
Qatar National Research Fund (QNRF), a member of Qatar Foundation (QF) and Qatar Shell Research and Technology Centre held the Competition at Qatar National Convention Centre, yesterday.
UREP, one of QNRF’s main programs, aims to develop research infrastructure in Qatar by establishing the basis of scientific research at undergraduate level, and its UREP Competition is held annually to recognise outstanding projects from the program. This year, 58 projects were selected after a competitive and rigorous screening process. Of these, 17 projects were shortlisted and 14 passed the final review stage to compete in the competition.
“Over the years, undergraduate students have built on their UREP experience to pursue further education and develop their research to actively contribute towards the development of Qatar,” said Dr Abdul Sattar Al Taie, Executive Director, QNRF.
“We take special pride in the fact that more than 235 scientific publications have been generated in the past UREP cycles which include 20 book chapters, 105 journal papers, 38 online papers, and 73 conference papers,” he added.
Hussain Al Hijji, Vice-President, Qatar Shell Research and Technology Centre, said, “We believe R&D is a fundamental part of Shell’s past and future success. Therefore, we continue to invest in people, projects, and facilities and in the same spirit, Qatar Shell is co-funding this important competition.
“The UREP program not only seeds the brilliant ideas from students and supports their development, but also acknowledges the mentoring professors and peers who constitute an important part of the participants’ academic journey.” First place in oral presentation was awarded to QU for the project, ‘Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation Simulator for Patient Management Training at Hamad Medical Corporation (HMC).
In the poster presentations category, TAMUQ won first place with, ‘An Investigation of the Factors Affecting Barite Sagging Related to Drilling Fluid Properties.’ “The research area is not part of our curriculum. It gave us the opportunity to improve our skills and added to our scope of knowledge on how to do conduct a research,” Alireza Roustazadeh, a member of the TAMUQ team that won the poster presentation, told The Peninsula.
The final competition included six oral presentations and eight poster presentations which were evaluated by an expert panel of judges.
“Many research work done under the UREP have been already published in international journals. Today the presentations were very competitive. It is a good sign of progress in developing human capital in the country,” said Dr Aisha Al Obaidly, Director of capacity Building at QNRF and member of the judging panel at 11th UREP.
