First Brainstorming Meeting on Thematic Research Areas
The first brainstorming meeting on AIT's thematic research areas took place at AIT on 12 July 2007. The meeting was also participated by Dr. Anders Granlund, Counsellor, Embassy of Sweden and Deputy-Director, SENSA Swedish Environmental Secretariat for Asia, who is also a member of AIT's Institute-level Advisory Board.
At the meeting, Professor S. K. Rakshit, Vice President for Research initially made a brief presentation of the expectations from such meetings. This includes feed back on the relevance of the proposed thematic areas by such external stake holders, planning modalities including links and contacts for fund raising for the thematic areas, etc. This was followed by six short presentations by members of the task forces and two presentations on entrepreneurship development and academic quality and pedagogical development. A number of useful suggestions were made by all participants and will help in further focusing AIT's endeavours to seek support and develop further some niche research areas with a critical mass of interdisciplinary faculty and research staff at AIT.