THE REVAMPED research office formally opened this semester, with its new head vowing to strengthen the University’s research niche on its 50th year.
The office was transformed into a “research and innovation” office from the “research and development” unit to promote academe-industry technology transfer, which will allow partnerships with industries and encourage commercialization of the University’s research output.
“This time, we will try to do research and come up with things that can be commercialized or put into immediate use,” said the new research director, Maribel Nonato, who recently left her post as dean of the College of Science.
However, intellectual property (IP) protection is needed if the University wants commercialization, she added. The office will be responsible for documents that would require protection.
The office plans to reinforce IP awareness in UST by urging deans to integrate such knowledge in the thesis writing of undergraduates.
“There [are] what you call ‘miners.’ They go around and look for possible technology that they can adopt. [But] sometimes they don’t really adopt, they just steal the idea,” Nonato said.
In November 2010, the University signed an agreement with the Intellectual Property Office of the Philippines to establish an Innovation and Technology Support Office, which aims to patent and protect the IP of Thomasian researchers.
The office also plans to conduct an inventory of all faculty members involved in research in line with the Commission on Higher Education’s (CHEd) planned “typology” of Philippine universities.
“In 2014, there would be the CHEd’s typology [and] under that, there’s a requirement that at least 20 percent of the faculty members are doing research to [still] be classified as a university,” she said. “We’ll come up first with a database to see how many of the faculties are really active in research.”
The office will also take the helm of the University journal Unitas, which went on a three-year hiatus.
Aside from the editorial board, an international advisory board will also be formed for Unitas to raise the journal’s standard. Future issues of the journal will focus only on one theme, Nonato said.
Research clusters for social and natural sciences, headed by Prof. Arlen Ancheta and Prof. Christina Binag, respectively, will be part of the new office. Additional research units for health sciences and theology, namely the Center of Health Sciences and the Research Center for Religious Studies and Ethics, will be integrated into the research office.
The Philippine Higher Education Research Network unit in UST, with Dr. Fortunato Sevilla III as director, will also be under the office.
Last December, UST was among the nine universities in the country tapped to form CHEd’s research center network, which has a research budget of P10 million a year for a period of three years.
New appointments
The new semester saw two other appointments from the Rector.
Cheryl Peralta, former chairperson of the department of Physical Therapy in the College of Rehabilitation Sciences, replaced Jocelyn Agcaoili as dean. Agcaoili left the post to finish her doctorate degree.
Peralta, whose term will last for one year, said she would focus on research-based community development programs in line with “changes in the research structure.”
Meanwhile, replacing Josefin de Alban as dean of the Faculty of Engineering is chemical engineering professor Philipina Marcelo, who acquired her doctorate degree in Food Science and Technology at the Cornell University in New York as a Fullbright scholar in 2002. Cez Mariela Teresa G. Verzosa
