Covid-19 pandemic reveals importance of indigenous science

The Covid-19 pandemic is the right time for Pakistan to build science capacity, and prepare the nation for future challenges.

This was stated by Prof Dr M Iqbal Choudhary, the International Centre for Chemical and Biological Sciences (ICCBS) director at the University of Karachi as he welcomed on Friday as many as 102 new scholars to the ICCBS MPhil and PhD programme.

The orientation class for the new students of MPhil and PhD programme 2020 was held in the Prof Salimuzzaman Auditorium.

Prof Choudhary remarked that the ongoing hard time required the nation to develop a culture of scientific thinking and rationality. “The fact is that learning is based on humility and thrust for knowing,” he said.

He welcomed all the students of the new batch and said the ICCBS owned a single largest 100 per cent merit-based doctoral programme in the country with over 600 PhD students, including students from different countries of the world.

Every student need to know that merit should be the key character of the personality, which is regardless of caste, creed, and color, he pointed out.

Social sciences

Research distinguishes the academic identity of any institution and we have to provide a the favourable learning environment in this regard. Societies that do not encourage research and development lose the ability of invention and they also fail to grow.

There is no denying the usefulness of the social sciences in the present age. Research in the social sciences offer solutions to public problems, including our social, societal, and economic problems, for which the research trend should increase.

These views were expressed by the Vice Chancellor University of Karachi Professor Dr Khalid Iraqi while talking to faculty members and heads of various departments of arts and social sciences faculty.

Appreciating the efforts of the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and the faculty members for the inclusion of three research journals of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences in the Y category, he said that the inclusion of research journals in the higher category is a testament to research activities in universities.

He said that despite that having high-quality standards at the University of Karachi, our researchers are unable to present their research in the way they should due to some technical reasons, which make their work less visible on the international scene. He said the administration is taking serious steps to solve this problem and hoped that it would produce better results in the future.

Earlier, Dean Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Professor Dr Nasreen Aslam Shah, while referring to the three research journals, informed the participants that every effort had been made to improve the index factor of the journals.