Research Faculty: A Strategic Focus

One of the initiatives undertaken by the universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM) to leap frog its research focus was to name and recognize seven faculties as "research faculty". The seven faculties are namely all four Engineering faculties (Chemical, Civil, Electrical & Mechanical), Faculty of Pharmacy, Faculty of Medicine and Faculty of Accountancy. For the Faculty of Accountancy, it is working very closely with the Accounting Research Institute (ARI). One of the most important strategies to be utilized by research faculties is to fully understand the requirements of the MyRA Instrument that has been developed by the Ministry of Higher Education (MOHE). . Understand the KPIs and the deliverables. Effectively, among the many items stressed by the MyRA instrument include: Number of Principal investigators; Number of Research Projects; Amount of Research Grants; Number of Staff with PhD qualification; Number of Staff with professional qualification; Number of post-graduate students; Number of PhD students enrolled & graduated; Number of Indexed publications (i.e. publications in journals and conference proceedings that are indexed by SCOPUS & ISI Thomson); Number of publications in refereed journals; Other publications; Innovation & IPR; Linkages & Networking; Awards & Scholarships; International Collaboration and Up-to date resources.
Hence, research faculties must strategically focus of the right things. All faculty members play a strategic role. A lecturer may want to focus on teaching, but he or she must still, nevertheless update his/her knowledge by writing academic books that could be used as reference materials. His or her research may not be empirical in nature, suffice to update his/her knowledge through critical review of the latest literature. A minimum MyRA score of 75 must be maintained at ALL time.