Official visit to UTM by the Minister of Higher Education

Skudai, June 20th: Dato’ Seri Mohamed Khaled Nordin made his first official visit to UTM since appointed the Minister of Higher Education last March after the 2008 General Election.

His arrival was received by the Vice Chancellor, Tan Sri Prof Dr. Mohd Zulkifli Tan Sri Mohd Ghazali, senior officers of UTM, Deans and other UTM Staffs and students at the Administrative Building, UTM Skudai.

After signing the guest book, the Minister was ushered to the Senate Hall where the Vice Chancellor gave a brief overview of UTM and a video presentation before the Minister himself delivered a speech.

In his speech, Dato’ Seri Khaled Nordin praised UTM as the best University in Johor and has highly contributed to the popularity of the state. He also expressed his congratulation on all the achievements especially in the Research and Development (R&D) and the rankings of it students.

“We are in the verge of enhancing our commercialization and after listening to the achievements UTM have made, we will follow suit the examples from UTM.

“Our nation is in the need of an educational revolution to become a competitive nation so all Universities must set their own key performance index as the Ministry wants to be realistic in this matter but we will do some realignment to ensure that what ever it is the University is planning, it is in line with the Higher Education Strategic Plan.

The Ministry is also planning to amend the University College University Act (AUKU) so that more autonomy can be given to the Universities,” he said.

Then the Minister made a quick visit the Sultanah Zanariah Library to see the latest learning materials in UTM and its latest digital delivery system mainly the UTM Institutional Repository (UTM IR) which was launched last year in July after visiting the exhibition booth at the Administrative Building’s foyer.

He also spared some time to witness the signing ceremony of a Memorandum of Agreement (MoA) between UTM and University of Cambridge and Rolls Royce PLC.

UTM was represented by the Vice Chancellor while Cambridge University was represented by the Project Leader Prof. Dr. Simone Hochgreb and Rolls Royce by Mr, Olof Rapp, the Regional Director in Malaysia.

The MoA are an early agreement of collaboration between UTM and the two parties after UTM was appointed by the Malaysian Industry – Government Group for High Tehcnology (MIGHT) under the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (MOSTI) to conduct a collaborative research.

It is under the Offset Trent 900 Programme to investigate the possibility of using biofuels for gas turbine combustion with a project cost of Euro 220, 163.00 which will be conducted in 3 years with a full funding from MOSTI.

 

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