Programmatically, the first phase (first four years)
of the SSE will certainly offer undergraduate
degrees in Physics, Chemistry, Biology and
Electrical Engineering, as well as graduate studies in
disciplines where appropriately trained
undergraduate students and sufficient faculty are
available. The first phase of SSE will complement
the existing undergraduate and graduate programs in
Mathematics and Computer Science at LUMS, and
provide the solid foundation upon which a
comprehensive engineering program can be built in
the second phase. While we foresee being small in
size, (a total student body of 2000 in the steady
state), demonstrated success of a research
university model will surely have a huge impact on
our science and engineering higher education system.
Challenges
Our vision is bold, but we would be remiss if we did
not talk about the challenges. There are many
hurdles to overcome in setting up a quality research
school in Pakistan - involving resources, faculty,
infrastructure, creating societal support for
scientific research and delivering the benefits of
research. Overcoming these challenges will require
our collective and focused will. But while our
target is daunting, we are fortunate to have the
support of many accomplished and resourceful people.
In the coming months, you will see many of them
mentioned in the letter as well as the website.
They have already contributed of their time,
energies and other resources and will, we hope,
continue to support us in the future. We offer our
sincere thanks to them, as well as to the friends of
LUMS, as we try to bring LUMS closer to its core
mission: efficient management of resources leading
towards national socio-economic development and
prosperity.
Project Team,
LUMS School
of Science and Engineering
Vice-Chancellor, LUMS
Management
Committee, LUMS
LUMS Board of Governors’
formal approval for the SSE - June, 2004
The LUMS Board gave the formal go ahead to build a
School of Science and Engineering committed to
excellence in research and education. Their
decision followed a careful planning period of more
than a year during which a feasibility team
consisting of LUMS faculty and outside experts
identified the country’s technological needs,
reviewed international trends and took stock of LUMS
resources. The team recommended creating a school of
science and engineering that provides integrated
multi-disciplinary education in sciences,
engineering, and other related areas (humanities,
social sciences and management) at both
undergraduate and graduate level. The board approval
makes the SSE initiative formal, making it easier to
plan and raise resources for the school.
Note:
The feasibility team for the
SSE included Dr. Khurram Afridi, Mr. Atif Alvi, Dr.
Haroon Babri, Dr. Ashraf Iqbal, Dr. Avais Kamal and
Dr. Mohammad Ali Maud.
Note: The work of the feasibility team would not have been possible
without the generous input provided by various
individuals from the industry and the academia. We
wish to express our deepest gratitude to the
following: Tanveer Minhas of And-Or-Logic; Dr.
Ashraf Choudhri, Dr. Nazir Ahmad Mir, Dr. G. R.
Pasha, Dr. Humayun Pervez, Dr. Suhail Aftab Qureshi
of Bahauddin Zakariya University; Dr. Farrukh Kamran
and Dr. Shoaib Khan of CARE; Asad Karin of Comcept;
Nasir Shafi and Rizwan Shafi of Crescent Textile;
Shah Hasan of CTI; Samir Hoodbhoy of DCC; Maj. Gen.
Akbar Saeed Awan and Asaf Waseem Qureshi of DESTO;
Ghulam Kafeel Majal of Descon; Col. Dr. Abdul
Ghafoor of EME College; Salim Azhar and Pervez Ghais
of Engro; Syed Azhar Hussain Shirazi of FFC;
Mohammad Ilyas of GFC; Suleman Daud of Haleeb Foods;
Dr. Iqbal Choudhry of HEJ Research Institute; Hassan
Ansari and Saleem Khan of ICI; Bakhtiar Wain of
Innovative; Syed Tahir Jan of J-Tech; Dr. Bukhari,
Waqar Butt and Qamar-ul-Huda of KANUPP; Dr. Ansar
Qidwai of Karachi University; Irfan ul Haq, Arif
Ijaz, Ghazanfarullah Khan and Irfan ul Haq of KSB
Pumps; Amir Hameed Khan of Masood Textile; Hassan
Gillani of Mentor Graphics; Javid Munir of Millat
Tractors; Capt. Nasir Mahmood and Comm. Tariq
Mahmood of MTC; Dr. Talat Altaf and Prof. Muzaffar
Mahmood of NED University; Muhammad Salim of Nestle;
Qaiser Jamal, Ahsan Kamal and Wasi Khan of National
Refinery; Sabir Sheikh of North Star Textile; Dr.
Aftab Maroof of FAST-NUCES; Saulat Saeed of
Packages; Dr. Masood of PAEC; Mr. Brohi, Manzoor
Haque and Col. Ijaz of Pakistan Steel; Haroon Khan
of PEL; Dr. Parvaiz Khan of Peoples Steel; Capt. N.
A. Bucha of PIA; Muhammad Sarwar of PTCL; Dr. Waheed
Akhtar, Dr. Khadim Hussain, Dr. A. R. Shakoori and
Dr. M. Yar Zaheer of Punjab University; Dr. Azhar
Rizvi and Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy of Quaid-e-Azam
University; Mohammad Ali, Mumshad Ali and Shamshad
Ali of RK Gears; Brig. Asif Hussain of Sapphire;
Ahmad Zaka ur Rehman and Muhammad Zaka ur Rehman of
Schazoo; Samer Awais and Sabeen Sheikh of Schering;
Sohail Wajahat and Kazi Faheem Uddin Ahmad of
Siemens; Hamid Jamshed of SineTrek; Dr. Maqbool
Ahmed and Maj. Gen. Raza Hussain of SUPARCO;
Zerullah Khan of TIP; and Dr. Mahmood Ahmad, Dr.
Anjum Ali, Dr. M. Ashraf Chughtai, Zaka ur Rahman,
Dr. Mian Saleem and Dr. Tabrez Shami of UET Lahore.
Infrastructure planning –
July-Dec, 2004
The LUMS SSE team has expended considerable effort
in the last few months in planning the physical
infrastructure (building and equipment) for a
quality research school. A crucial component of this
plan is the facility program, detailing the spaces
(laboratories, classrooms, offices, etc.) needed for
the new school. The facility program gates the
architecture and construction phases, and is based
upon the school’s curriculum, student enrollment,
and faculty and staff headcount.
In
a systematic effort, Drs. Khurram Afridi, Amer Iqbal
and Hamid Zaman developed initial drafts of the
curriculum, with help from a virtual program
development team, and review from the LUMS Science
and Engineering Coordination Committee. The virtual
program development team then physically met in
Boston to develop the final curriculum in a
concerted weeklong exercise. The current version of
the curriculum is comparable to that of MIT,
Stanford, Caltech and UC Berkeley, i.e., very strong
in fundamentals, including design courses, and
exposing students to a wide variety of subjects.
In
a parallel effort some members of the SSE team (Dr.
Khurram Afridi, Prof. Syed Zahoor Hassan, and Mr.
Syed Babar Ali) identified several good laboratory
designs by visiting laboratories at Stanford,
Caltech, MIT, UC Berkeley, Harvard, UCLA, Washington
University, National University of Singapore,
Nanyang Technological University and Malaysia
University of Science and Technology. Next, Mr.
Habib Fida Ali (a nationally renowned architect who
has designed the current LUMS campus) was engaged to
design the building for the SSE. Mr. Habib Fida Ali
and Dr. Khurram Afridi conducted a second round of
visits to the best-of-breed labs to obtain further
data and then validated their observations at a
laboratory design conference in Boston and through
meetings with professional campus planners and lab
designers in Boston, St. Louis and San Francisco.
The LUMS SSE team now has sufficient curriculum,
head count and laboratory design data for the
facility program to be finalized and validated.
Dober, Lidsky, Craig and Associates, a Boston based
campus and facility planning consulting firm, has
been engaged to validate the facility program and
this work is currently ongoing. The validated
facility program will allow the creation of detailed
architectural plans (slated for this winter), and
the beginning of school construction in the first
quarter of 2005.
Notes
 |
The LUMS Science and Engineering Coordination
Committee mentioned above is: Professors Zaeem Jafri
- Mathematics, Rasul Bakhsh Rais – Social Sciences,
Ali Cheema - Economics and Ashraf Iqbal - Computer
Science. |
|
|
The virtual program development team that drafted
the curriculum in Boston involved: Drs. Khurram
Afridi – MIT Alum, Adil Bashir - Washington
University, Salal Humair – MIT Alum, Umar Mahmood -
Harvard, Farhan Rana - Cornell, Ayman Shabra – MIT
Alum, Afreen Siddiqi – MIT, Tasneem Zahir - Harvard,
Hamid Zaman - MIT, Bilal Zuberi - MIT Alum, and
Wenhsiu Hassan – Caltech Alum, with remote help from
Dr. Rizwan Gul – MIT Alum.
|
Building support networks –
Feb-Dec, 2004
A
less physically tangible part of the process, but
crucially important in the planning years, is the
creation of a support network of academics,
professionals and researchers worldwide. Since the
LUMS SSE team is currently quite small, and since
LUMS itself does not have sufficient resident
expertise in science and engineering, we recognized
early that much of the intellectual heavy lifting
must come from external sources.
We
have been lucky to find early support from the
virtual program development team (VPDT, some of whom
are mentioned above). In the past few months, the
value of groups like the VPDT has become patent.
This experience has strengthened our sense that it
is critical to identify such support networks early
and nurture them to become strong contributors to
the SSE. Our gains on the infrastructure planning
and curriculum, for instance, would have been
unimaginable without the support of the VPDT over
the last nine months.
Academic support, however, is only part of the
story. An enterprise of ideals like the SSE also
needs to be based on strong societal support. At
this early stage, individuals, institutions, or
corporations may provide such support in forms of
encouragement or forms that are more tangible. In
every case, it is important that the societal
support network grows in its understanding of what
we are trying to achieve with the LUMS SSE, even as
our own understanding grows of the role of a
research school in Pakistan. Several institutions
and individuals have helped us in some form over the
last months. This support has come not only from
Pakistan, but from across the world and from a range
of nationalities. Fully recognizing the dangers of
omissions in acknowledgement lists we wish to thank:
Adnan Lawai, Dr. Ahmad Durrani, Dr. Andre Avignon,
Dr. Asad Abidi, Atiq Raza, Dr. David Perreault, Dr.
David Rutledge, Hajira Qureshi, Hassan Ahmed, Dr.
Harry Gray, Imran Nasrullah, Jill Andrews, Dr. Joe
Ackerman, Dr. John Kassakian, Dr. John Ofori,
Mahjabeen Quadri, Dr. Mir Imran, Dr. Nabeel Riza,
Dr. Nigel Wilson, Dr. Steve Graves, Dr. Rafael Bras and Safi Qureshi
in the US; Dr. Shaukat Brah and Dr. Yaqoob Siyal in
Singapore; and Dr. Moazzam Hossain and Dr. Choon
Heng Leong in Malaysia. There are many more people
to thank for supporting the work of the LUMS SSE
Project Team over the last few months. While it is
impossible to list everyone’s name and contribution,
we are deeply appreciative of the time and energy
they have so freely given to this initiative.
We
will need to organize several such groups soon, to
tackle our short and long-term issues in the first
years. We will therefore invest significant energy
in the coming months to reach out to a larger set of
academics, professionals, individuals and
institutions around the world. Our
hope is to engage as broad a spectrum of society as possible,
and academics and researchers in particular, who are interested in
the region's development. We hope to make the LUMS SSE an
exciting new conduit through which all of us can
learn and
contribute initially to Pakistan and eventually to
the region.
