QNRF announces the awards of the 1st Cycle of Young Scientists Research Experience Program (YSREP)

The Qatar National Research Fund (QNRF) announced today the results of the 1^st Cycle of its Young Scientists Research Experience Program (YSREP). The cut-off score adopted was 80%, which resulted in six awarded projects, the total funding awarded in this cycle is US$1.4M, the awarded projects duration span between one and three years.

 Dr. Abdul Sattar Al-Taie, QNRF Executive Director stated that “This inaugural YSREP cycle generated a good interest from young researchers in the major academic institutions in Qatar as well as HMC who submitted research proposals addressing some interesting scientific problems in Medical, Information Technology and Social fields in Qatar”. Dr. Al-Taie added “Given the success of the first cycle and the desire of some academic institutions in Qatar; QNRF has decided to have two funding cycles of this program annually. Dr. Al-Taie declared “This will provide timely support to young scientists in Qatar to start their own research projectsâ€Â.

 QNRF received in this cycle a total of eleven proposals, they were independently evaluated by three internationally renowned peer reviewers. QNRF was keen to ensure the utmost integrity and transparency throughout the submission, the screening and the review processes.

 The awards reflect Qatar Foundation’s ambitious vision of developing research culture in the state of Qatar as well as QNRF’s dedication in fulfilling that vision. The awarded projects came from 3 Academic institutions inside Qatar; Carnegie Mellon Qatar (3 projects), Qatar University (2 projects) and Weill Cornell Medical Collage in Qatar (1 proposal) as shown in the table below:

For his part, Dr. Munir Tag, YSREP Program Manager, highlighted that the awarded projects deal with diversified areas of research of priority to Qatar, ranging from expanding Arabic Wikipedia by Machine Translation, localizing Mobile Robots in Industrial Environment such as Oil and Gas; building Econometric Models for Revenue Management facing customers' cannibalization that has applications in the Airline Industry, to Novel Fluorescence-quenching Lipid Probes for Intracellular Lipoplex Tracking applications in Gene Therapy and Subcellular Microscopy. Dr. Tag emphasized that the subjects treated by the awarded proposals address directly issues of critical importance to Qatar and to the research community.

YSREP is semi-annual with funds of US $100,000 per project per year; project duration can be up to 3 years. The program aims to provide critical and adequate support to young Qatari scientists or residing in Qatar who are at the stage of starting or consolidating their own independent research team or their independent research program. Candidates applying for funding under this program are required to hold a doctorate degree with at least two peer-reviewed scientific publications and have age limited to 35 years. The candidate should be affiliated to a local institution in Qatar at the time of submitting the research proposal and during the entire duration of the project.