Long Term Grant Scheme

Long term grant Scheme or LRGS is an initiative by the Ministry of Higher Education (MOHE) to support research activities of researchers in institutions of higher learning in Malaysia.  Basically, LRGS is created for fundamental research that involves extensive scope and longer duration and requires high commitment among researchers. Essentially, researches financed by LRGS are expected to generate new advance ideas and theories in the strategic niche areas (of the ministry and the government) to expand the boundaries of knowledge.  To date, there are two types of LRGS grants, namely top-down and bottom-up.  The top-down scheme must be lead by a research university (RU) and focuses on eight research niche: Global Warming, Infectious Disease, Tropical Disease, Food Security, Energy & Water Security, ICT, Andanced & value Manufacturing and Societal Wellbeing.  Meanwhile, bottom-up scheme can be lead by any university and  may include eight (8) of the research areas above or researchers may propose any other areas.  Priorities however are given to researches that are in tandem with the country's National Priority Areas (NPA).  All LRGS applications including concept papers must be reviewed and certified by the Chair/Director of Research Management Committee (RMC) of the University. Each sub-project applications must go through the RMC of respective universities. Review reports must be submitted to the Secretariat of LRGS and MOHE together with the application form. Only applications that are supported/approved by RMC need to be sent to MOHE.  Meanwhile, MOHE appoints panel members, who in turn will review proposed concept papers. LRGS research projects must involve a variety of institutions with a minimum of 3 institutions.  Projects (minimum of 3) must be multi-disciplinary, involving the corpus of science & technology and social sciences & humanities.  Minimum research output for a three-year LRGS projects are:  (i)    at least 10 PhD students, (ii) publication of at least 50 papers in indexed journals and (iii)  3 IPs.  Recently, the first LRGS evaluation meeting for 2016 was held at MOHE.