AIT and Cambodia’s ITC high on French cooperation agenda

On 18 October 2007, the Institute received the visit of Dr. Moncef Meddeb, Advisor to the Administration of the Institute of Technology of Cambodia (ITC). AIT President Said Irandoust personally met him, together with Dr. Pritam K. Shrestha, Head ERCO, and Mr. Jean-Philippe Thouard, Advisor to the administration. The French Government has been supporting ITC since the beginning of the 1990s and will soon be launching a new cooperation on engineering education in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam. There is keen interest to engage AIT as a possible partner in this initiative. Moreover, there is the possibility of ITC faculty and staff being sent to AIT for training financed by the French Government. One important area of focus will be electrical engineering and energy focusing on undergraduate as well as master's and Ph.D. programs.

Dr. Meddeb also had extensive discussions with Professor Sudip Rakshit, Vice-President for Research; Dr. Weerakorn Ongsakul, Secretary General of GMSARN; Professor Sivanappan Kumar, Dean SERD; Dr. Nitin Afzulpurkar, SET Associate Dean, as well as representatives of the fields of study of SERD and SET. The discussions focused on how to reinforce the cooperation between ITC and AIT in academic and research areas for the mutual benefit of both institutions. As ITC intends to reinforce its research capacity and to launch master's degree programs in the near future, it is seeking to do so in partnership with other institutions in the region such as AIT. Numerous ideas were discussed to concretely launch and refine this cooperation, such as the participation of AIT in ITC's undergraduate programs, the use of AIT expertise for the development of ITC's master's programs which could be joint or dual degrees with AIT, schemes for the development of joint research activities, and collaboration between AIT and ITC for the development of information and telecommunication technologies for education in the region and with Europe. On the following day, Mr. Thouard, together with Dr. Meddeb, participated in a debriefing meeting at the French Embassy in Bangkok during which the French Cooperation expressed its full support towards the development of the relations between AIT and ITC, two institutes at the core of its activities in the region.