ISLAMABAD, April 11: The Organization of Islamic Conference Standing Committee on Scientific and Technological Cooperation (COMSTECH) has initiated a project to award PhD scholarships in frontier technologies.

The scholarships will be awarded to do PhD from a Higher Education Commission recognized university/research institution in the fields of Nano Technology, Stem Sell Research, High Tech Manufacturing Engineering and Renewable Energy.

Set up in 1981 by the Third Islamic Summit held in Jeddah, COMSTECH has been mandated to work for the revival of science in Muslim world. The organization was tasked with preparing an overall strategy and launching programmes to counter the issue of massive technological dependency of the Muslim world on advanced countries. This dependency is resulting in serious repercussions on the security, socio-economic progress and cultural integrity of Muslim countries.

Human resource development is one of the main thrust areas of COMSTECH programmes. The PhD scholarships, awarded under Frontier Technologies programmes, will initially be for one year, renewable annually for another three years with emoluments of Rs10,000 per month to the successful candidates.

Honorarium amounting to Rs100,000 will also be awarded to the supervisor. An amount of Rs200,000 per annum will be provided as research grant for consumables and laboratory expenses to the supervisor.

Under the programme, travel support will be provided to the students having obtained admissions to the specified fields in recognized universities abroad.

At the moment, COMSTECH is supporting one PhD project in Fuel Cell research and has provided travel grants to students for study in Oxford University, UK, in Stem Cell research and university of Delaware, US, in Nano Technology.