HYDERABAD, March 2: Dr John A. Tinker of the University of Leeds has praised the academic services of the Mehran University of Engineering and Technology, Jamshoro. “I have no doubt that with the current programme of putting a significant number of staff through PhD programmes and with the excellent new research laboratories being built, the university has bright future”, he said.

He was addressing faculty members and students of the university at main auditorium on Wednesday.

He said that the objective of his visit was to assess the university’s facilities, consider exchange of faculty members, joint PhD supervision, holding of workshops and seminars, laboratory development and training of the MUET staff, attendance of staff on short courses at the Leeds University and research collaboration.

He said that one of his colleagues from Leeds University (Dr Desmond Mclernon) had visited the MUET in November 2005 with the specific brief on collaboration possibilities with departments of electrical, electronics and computer engineering.

He said that his brief was to report on similar collaboration possibilities within departments of civil, mechanical, architecture, industrial, metallurgy and materials.

He said that during the visit, he toured many of the university facilities and met most of the key staff.

He said the MUET was a young developing university that has already done much to establish a good range of undergraduate programmes. The syllabus cater well for training of future engineers, he said.

He said the senior staff were well-qualified, most with PhD’s awarded by a range of highly-respected universities world wide.

Having developed an excellent range of undergraduate courses, staff are ambitious to develop and extend the range of postgraduate courses they already offer, the scholar said.

Dr Tinker said that research was in a developing stage in many of departments despite enthusiasm of the staff and it was somewhat restricted by limited access to high quality research information and outdated equipment.

He said that facilities need to be developed to address these problems and to provide an environment conducive to research.

The foundations for this have already been laid, extensive new infrastructure facilities are being built and funding has been approved to purchase the latest equipment, he said.

He said that developing infrastructure needs support by staff development and this would necessitate increasing the number of PhDs amongst younger members of staff and attracting high calibre researchers to the MUET.