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| About SSE |
The LUMS SSE will be a new school within LUMS housing undergraduate and graduate programs in Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Electrical Engineering and Industrial Engineering/Operations Research in the beginning, and a wide variety of other Engineering disciplines within a very short term. To learn more about our motivation and vision for the school, as well as the activities that have taken place so far, please see our newsletters. The initiative is currently being led out of LUMS by a small Project Team, supported by the LUMS Faculty and Management Committee, the Virtual Program Development Team (VPDT), a remote group of academics and professionals, and guided by the Advisory Board. To contact the Project Team and learn more about the LUMS SSE, please send an email to sseinfo@lums.edu.pk.
Our decision to build a school for Science and Engineering follows a careful planning period of more than a year during which we identified the country’s technological needs, reviewed international trends, took stock of our resources, understood our challenges, and built a strong support network of educators, researchers and corporate leaders world-wide. Most of all, we understood why we should do it. |
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The Need
Pakistan continues to lose talent, while our industry remains technologically dependent and our universities remain intellectually barren. Almost exclusively, our industry manufactures products licensed from foreign companies. To be globally competitive, or even to survive, we need to start producing high-value-added products and services. This requires scientists and engineers who are technically competent, innovative, entrepreneurial, have leadership qualities and broad problem solving skills. Our universities are not equipped for this responsibility. Their graduates are narrowly specialized and are unable to create knowledge at the boundary between multiple disciplines, increasingly the domain of true technological breakthroughs. Further, they have ineffective linkages with industry, an acute shortage of qualified faculty and no internal faculty pipeline to sustain academic or corporate entities. If we are to compete internationally or even survive, we need to produce a cadre of scientists and engineers who can not only develop technologies suitable for local conditions but also create entirely new economic and social opportunities for the country.
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The Vision
We envision LUMS School of Science and Engineering as the vanguard of a new class of institutions. A successful research university model for Pakistan and indeed the region; perhaps an MIT, Stanford or a Caltech for Pakistan. We hope to transform science and engineering education and research in the country. We bring to this enterprise our existing strengths: our leadership position as an educational institution; our track record of success; our ability to reinvent ourselves; our academic infrastructure for integrated multi-disciplinary programs; and most importantly, the credibility to attract the best students and faculty in Pakistan. We also see new opportunities: (i) a much larger pool of Pakistani researchers than 20 years ago when LUMS began, (ii) tremendous support from this larger pool for our initiative, and (iii) the increasing realization and support of industry leaders inside and outside the country who recognize the need for such an institution.
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The Execution
The School of Science and Engineering will start in Fall 2008 with new undergraduate programs in Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Electrical Engineering and Industrial Engineering/Operations Research following within four years by graduate programs in each discipline. In September 2008 SSE will also inherit the existing mathematics and computer science/engineering undergraduate and graduate programs at LUMS. This will provide the solid foundation upon which additional programs, including biological engineering, chemical engineering, material science and mechanical engineering, will be built at a later stage. We will be hiring more than 70 additional faculty members, and constructing new teaching and research laboratories. Attracting the most talented undergraduates will require a significant financial aid package for which we have allocated an annual budget of $0.5 million, allowing 40% of the undergraduates a 50% tuition waiver on average. Graduate students doing funded research will receive a stipend in addition to a tuition waiver. To attract the best faculty and allow them to do quality research, a research support grant will be provided for their first 3 years. Realizing the School of Science and Engineering will require significant financial resources. Our initial target was to raise $25 million which we have met (see Giving to LUMS SSE). Our new total target is $125 million of which $75 million will go into the SSE's endowment fund.
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The Impact
We strongly believe that this initiative will change the face of education in Pakistan as well as the region. Through its world-class science and engineering graduates and high quality, industrially relevant research, it will catalyze genuine industrial development in the region.
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