Higher Education Commission of Pakistan places 1,041 PhDs as Assistant Professors
Wednesday, July 25, 2012
The Higher Education Commission (HEC) has placed 1,041 Pakistani PhDs as assistant professors in public sector and leading private sector universities across the country under its Interim Placement of Fresh PhDs (IPFP) Programme.
The qualified applicants are placed in universities which are ready to offer these professionals a fair chance of absorption on permanent posts through normal selection process within the one-year contract period.
These scholars have been initially employed for a period of one year on a salary package of Rs104,000 per month. They may be hired on permanent basis on completion of their tenure through the normal selection process of the host institution.
The HEC has also offered these scholars a start-up research grant of Rs0.5 million upon joining the host institutions. So far, the IPFP Programme has processed around 1,416 applications while 233 applicants are at different stages of placement.
The placed scholars belong to diversified fields like Water Resource Management, Biotechnology, Food Engineering, Animal Nutrition, Biochemistry, Nano-chemistry and Nano-catalysis, Plasma Physics, Supply Chain Management, Water Resource Engineering, Cell Biology and Civil & Environmental Engineering. Some other domains include Fish Molecular Biology, Pharmaceutical Chemistry, High Energy Physics, Biomedical Textiles, Leadership, Culture & Social Preferences, Geophysics, Mathematics, Computer Sciences, Business Education, Social Sciences, Humanities, Environmental Sciences and Biomedical Textiles.
The HEC is not only striving to provide opportunities to the aspiring scholars to pursue higher degrees, both at domestic and international levels, it has also devised the IPFP Programme for facilitating the placement of these scholars at academic and research institutions.
This comes as a result of the visionary approach of HEC to ensure proper utilisation of the manpower being trained through huge investments in the scholarship programmes. The HEC's Interim Placement of Fresh PhDs Programme is underlying two-pronged approach. Primarily it provides the lucrative avenues of employment to the fresh PhD professionals and secondly it meets the faculty requirement of public and private sector universities/DAIs for ensuring quality teaching and research, which is one of the core strategic aims of HEC.
The IPFP provides to all Pakistani fresh PhD graduates an opportunity to be placed as assistant professor on a tenure track system-based assistant professor position for a maximum of one-year period.
Further, each IPFP awardee is also provided with a Rs0.5 million start-up research grant to initiate a feasible research project at his/her host university, immediately upon joining. This ongoing regular programme is open to all fields. The placed scholars have found this programme quite useful and effective and termed it quite helpful in countering brain drain at the national level.
Pakistani universities have produced more PhDs in the last 9 years (3,950) since the establishment of HEC than in the first 55 years (3,280). The universities are now able to produce more PhDs in the next 3 years than in the last 9 years. Research output has grown eight-fold since 2002 (from 815 in 2002 to 6,200 in 2011) and 80 per cent of these research publications from Pakistan are coming from Higher Education Institutions (HEIs).
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