Qatar forges ahead with science vision
News source: http://thelancet.com/
Brian Owens visited Qatar to see how the tiny Gulf state is working to become a world leader in health and life sciences research as part of its broader national vision for 2030.
Qatar might be small, but it has big ambitions in several realms, including science. The Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development is the organisation charged with delivering the country’s research plans along with the rest of its National Vision for 2030, which aims to modernise the state and develop a strong knowledge economy to keep the country going when natural gas reserves eventually run out. The Foundation is a semi-private non-profit organisation, set up in 1995 to help transform Qatar from a petro-state into a leader in education, research, and the arts. It is headed by Sheika Moza bint Nasser Al Missned, one of the wives of the former emir, who takes a strong personal interest in the Foundation’s work, according to those who work there. “She has a strong commitment to health care globally and locally”, says Egbert Schillings, chief executive of the World Innovation Summit for Health, which is held in Qatar’s capital Doha each February.
Health and life sciences is one of the four scientific priorities the Foundation is focused on to realise the national vision—alongside energy and water, cyber security, and environmental research—and some see it as the most important. “The life sciences are definitely where the accent is”, says Schillings.
One stop shop
When it comes to funding for biomedical research, the Qatar Foundation is pretty much the only game in town. It supports extramural research at Qatar’s two domestic universities and nine branch campuses of international universities—six from the USA, and one each from France, the UK, and Canada. It also funds more directed research at several research institutes, and technology transfer and commercialisation in a new science and technology park.
It is difficult, however, to determine how much money the Foundation is spending on science and research because financial transparency does not seem to be a high priority. The Foundation’s annual reports give some examples of spending on research, but no detailed breakdown of budget lines, or even the total budget. Requests for further information were not answered in time for publication.
Qatar has pledged to spend 2·8% of its gross domestic product (GDP) on science annually. Qatar’s GDP in 2013 was more than US$200 billion, giving a notional science budget of nearly $6 billion, but it has not yet come close to meeting that target—not because of a lack of funds or political will, but because there simply are not enough scientists in the country to absorb that amount of money.
Much of the funding is channelled through the Qatar National Research Fund (QNRF), a funding agency similar to the US National Science Foundation that was set up in 2006, which funds all fields of scientific research, supporting researchers from undergraduates up to senior scientists. In 2013, the QNRF awarded $120 million under its flagship National Priorities Research Programme; however, details about how much of that went to each national priority, including health research, are not available.
QNRF funds nearly all of the extramural university research in the country, but a fairly large proportion also goes overseas. For each grant the principal investigator must be based in Qatar, but up to 35% of the money can be spent on research abroad. “That’s unique among national research funders”, says Thomas Zacharia, senior vice-president of research and development at the Qatar Foundation.
The fund’s grants go to a limited number of universities. Qatar has two of its own: Qatar University, the older and more established of the two, and Hamad bin Khalifa University, which was established in 2013. Although Qatar University does do research, and wins the lion’s share of grants from QNRF, its main focus is on undergraduate education and training. The newer institution is set to be more research-oriented, and will focus on graduate degrees. Two of the international branch campuses—Weill Cornell Medical College and the University of Calgary—also focus on health and biomedical science.
The relatively small pool of applicants means that success rates are quite high. “I think that’s the greatest advantage [to doing research in Qatar], you have this large funding pool and less competition to access funds”, says Kim Critchley, dean of the University of Calgary’s Qatar campus.
The role of those branch campuses is changing as Qatar’s education system evolves and matures, says Zacharia. When the first ones were established about 10 years ago, they were focused on undergraduate education. But now they are starting to become more research-intensive. “As we move in to the next phase, the idea is to have better synergies with the branch campuses to train graduate students”, says Zacharia. Read more >>>