KEN IGE / KIGE@STARBULLETIN.COM
As part of a rebuilding program in Iraq, Catherine Chan-Halbrendt, left, Ali Fares, Brian Turano, Ekhlass Jarjees, Samir El-Swaify and Sahar Zaghloul will go to the University of Mosul next month.
UH researchers
to help rebuild
Iraqi institutionA group of professors and
administrators will assess
the needs of Mosul University
The University of Mosul was one of the Middle East's most prestigious institutions in the early '90s. Two gulf wars later, Iraq's second-largest college has a barren library, little laboratory equipment and an academic staff that has been largely isolated from advances in their fields for more than a decade.
A team of University of Hawaii researchers hopes to help the university rebuild.
Armed with a federal grant worth up to $11.1 million, the UH scientists say they aim to provide the jump start for the university.
"They really have gone downhill. They will be given the opportunity to grow with our help," said Simar El-Swaify, the grant's project director and chairman of the UH Department of Natural Resources & Environmental Management.
El-Swaify said that after the end of the second Iraq war, looters stripped the university of a number of books and the few remaining expensive laboratory pieces.
Media reports from the country put the number of volumes, rare books and manuscripts stolen from the university's library in a mass looting of Mosul in May at almost 900,000. Reports also said lab kits were carried off, and the university's computer department was stripped.
As part of the grant, $3.7 million of which was awarded earlier this month by the U.S. Agency for International Development, UH-Manoa professors and administrators will tour the Iraqi university late next month to find out the needs of students and professors.
The grant is renewable for two years, and subsequent awards depend upon the team's progress at the university.
The UH team will focus on the University of Mosul's agricultural sciences -- once the university's hallmark program. The researchers say centering on agricultural revitalization could help address Iraq's food production shortages, at least in the long run.
"With an economy primarily dominated by oil revenues, it is often overlooked that Iraq remains predominantly an agricultural nation," El-Swaify wrote in an outline describing how his team would use the grant money. "A clear need exists for reversing the well-documented decline in nutritional status, especially for children in Iraq."
In the first year, the grant will bring up to 15 Iraqi graduate students to study at UH-Manoa, help supplement the Mosul university's library and laboratories, and afford $20,000 research grants to a number of its professors.
About one-third of the funds are earmarked for the University of Dohuk, a smaller nearby Iraqi college, for agricultural programs and training.
Four of the grant's five researchers -- all of whom specialize in different areas of agricultural or environmental science -- speak Arabic. One, a professor in the UH College of Tropical Agriculture, received her bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Mosul and served as a lecturer there for 14 years.
"I still know the faculty there," said UH entomologist Ekhlass Jarjees, who is now an Australian citizen. "They have asked for equipment because they don't have. We will go evaluate their needs and their requirements."
The grant is also expected to form a partnership that could mean future student and professor exchanges between UH and the Iraqi universities, especially the University of Mosul.
UH-Manoa was the only single institution to receive the federal agency grant earmarked to aid colleges in Iraq.
The State University of New York at Stony Brooke will lead a consortium of colleges, including Columbia and Oxford universities, to help Baghdad University, Al Mustansiriyah University in Baghdad, Basrah University and Mosul University with a $4.1 million grant.
Depaul University College and the International Institute of Higher Studies in Criminal Sciences in Siracusa, Italy, which received a $3.8 million grant, will partner to work with the University of Baghdad.
Catherine Chan-Halbrendt, UH college of tropical agriculture's associate dean and the grant's co-director, said that among other things, she is in charge of re-equipping the University of Mosul's library. She has been collaborating with a research librarian at the UH Hamilton Library and professors at the Iraqi institution to understand what resources an agriculture-oriented reference center should include.
"We've been talking, even in the writing of the (grant) proposal," she said. "It's a collaborative effort."
