Lecturers’ Breakfast Meeting: The Research Agenda
The Directorate of Research, Innovation, Commercialization and Extension (RICE) organized a four-day breakfast meeting for lecturers and tutorial fellows from Tuesday, 25th to Friday, 28th April 2023. The four-day event attracted participants from across all the 8 schools; School of Agriculture and Food Science (SAFS), School of Business and Economics (SBE), School of Computing and Informatics (SCI), School of Education (SEd.), School of Engineering and Architecture (SEA), School of Health Sciences (SHS), School of Nursing (SoN) and School of Pure and Applied Sciences (SPAS). The Vice-Chancellor, Prof. Romanus Odhiambo attended the meetings and was accompanied by the Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic and Student Affairs), Prof. Simon Thuranira and the Ag. Registrar (Academic and Student Affairs), Dr. Stephen Karanja. Speaking during the breakfast meeting, the Vice Chancellor, Prof. Romanus Odhiambo, emphasized on the mandate of the University; Research, Teaching and training and Community extension. He further urged staff to always uphold the core values of the University; Competitiveness, Integrity, Innovation, Professionalism and Quality while delivering their services.
The main discussion of the meeting was The Research Agenda in three areas;
Publications
The DVC ASA, the Registrar ASA and the Library department shared insights on publications. There was a call from the Senior librarian, Ms. Ruth Gibendi, encouraging all members of staff to create an ORCID and Google Scholar accounts and ensure that their publications are indexed by Google. There are a number of reasons why Google Scholar may fail to index one’s publication and they are but not limited to: name disambiguation and publishing in predatory journals.
Board of Post Graduate Studies (BPS)
The Director of the Board of Postgraduate Studies, Prof. Eustace Mwenda, encouraged the Deans and Department heads to ensure that postgraduate students share their quarterly reports to the directorate.
Grants
The Directorate of RICE has planned the 9th call for research grants. The grant will be divided into three tiers: seed grant (will be given to the Principal Investigator – PI who will be supervising a postgraduate student), the second tier is the individual research grant and the last category will be the multidisciplinary grant. All staff and postgraduate students are encouraged to be on the lookout for the internal grants call.
In addition to the internal grants are the external grants. MUST has renewed its subscription to a site where research opportunities are being shared. MUST encourages staff members to create accounts in the Research Beeline and actively apply for the external grants. The Directorate of RICE will offer any support required.
