National University of Sciences and Technology, Pakistan

About NUST

National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST) was established by the Government of Pakistan in 1991 for the promotion of higher scientific education in the country, especially in the field of sciences and technology, by providing stable and disciplined academic environment together with a need based research opportunities pertinent to our industrial requirements. NUST is the first model university established by the Ministry of Science and Technology like KAIST of Korea. The university was granted the Charter in 1993. Besides covering a wide variety of engineering disciplines, the horizon of NUST covers (but does not limit to) information technology, medical, management sciences and basic sciences.

President as Patron in Chief

Prime Minister of Pakistan as Chancellor

Muhammad Asghar(Current) as Rector

The university is stipulated to produce engineers, doctors, scientists, IT experts and managers of a very high caliber, capable of developing indigenous technology to meet the growing demands of the new millennium. NUST is envisioned to be a beacon of light for the country’s scientific and technological progress. The establishment of NUST is an unprecedented event of immense significance and a major milestone in the perennial history of higher education in Pakistan. The university is based on a multi-campus concept, which envisages its over 40 years old constituent colleges to grow and develop in the existing locations as centres of excellence in their own fields of specialization. An outstanding feature of the university is that while maintaining traditional values of excellence in teaching and research, it challenges the conventional practices and creates new ways of developing and delivering courses on the most modern lines.

NUST is a public sector degree awarding autonomous university with its own charter and is presently running a number of undergraduate, postgraduate and PhD programmes in various disciplines. These programmes are made distinctive for their high quality in academics and research orientation. The university places heavy weightage on research, thus PhD is offered in a large number of disciplines. Creativity and innovation are the hallmarks of teaching programmes at NUST. Academic ambiance and disciplined environment are the distinctive features of NUST’s campuses, and are instrumental in providing stability and continuity to education.

All round academic and intellectual activity keeps the students continuously committed to studies and academic pursuits with adequate holidays after every semester.

The active research linkages of NUST with international universities of repute to ensure two-way flow of knowledge and to avoid stagnation are well known. Visits of eminent professors from reputed foreign universities of UK, USA, Australia, Japan, Singapore, China and Canada to NUST is a regular feature of immense significance. All of these eminent professors make a vital contribution in academic and research audit and delivering lectures to the students on the state-of-the-art technology.

Programmes at NUST

NUST offers a wide range of undergraduate and postgrduate programmes in following four areas:

Engineering

Medicine

Management

IT

Achievements of NUST

During the short span of its existence, NUST has achieved recognition at both the national and international levels and can proudly highlight the following achievements:

Has developed active collaborations with foreign universities of international repute for split programmes at PhD level, exchange of faculty and students to ensure regular flow of knowledge at least cost.

Has MS programmes leading to PhD in almost all engineering and IT disciplines.

Has MPhil and PhD programmes in almost all disciplines in engineering, IT, medical and management sciences.

Has made substantial progress in R&D to solve the problems of the public and private sector.

Is providing training and consultancy services to the industry and other business organizations.

Has been awarded the prestigious Associate Membership of CERN (Centre for European Nuclear Research), Geneva, based on the performance and potential in the field of IT.

NUST Institute of Information Technology (NIIT) has been awarded status of Authorized Academic Training Programme Institution (AATPI) by Microsoft Corp, USA.

In recognition of excellent performance in IT, Intel Corporation and NCR Corporation, USA have established their IT labs at NIIT.

NUST has established facilities for conducting National and International video conferencing between its campuses for distance learning, thesis defence and video lectures by eminent scholars.

Has the distinction of being the first university in Pakistan to achieve ISO 9000 certification.

Is member of the Association of Commonwealth Universities (ACU).

Has procured hi-tech lab equipment essentially needed for doctoral/postdoctoral research work with financing through Islamic Development Bank (IDB).

IDB is financing 250,000 US dollars as grant for availing the services of highly qualified researchers from abroad, over and above the programmes of Ministry of Science & Technology (MoST).

The Center for European Nuclear Research (CERN) invited two brilliant research students of NUST to present their research findings at its campus in Switzerland. A team of software engineers from NUST has been developing an agent-based framework in collaboration with the California Institute of Technology (CALTECH), USA. This research resulted in development of state of the art software to be used for scientific analysis by CERN scientists in particular and for Grid environment in data intensive business and financial applications in general.

Adding to the achievements of National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST), the university has proudly received grant of 4000,000 Euros from European Commission for its project titled "STAFF" (Selection, Training and Assessment of Future Faculty). This grant has provided an opportunity to NUST to address the need of improving the higher education situation in Pakistan. NUST scientists are convinced that this milestone will provide the solution to the core problem of acute shortage of suitably qualified faculty especially in more technical areas such as Information Technology and Computer Sciences.

Two years of consistent development efforts at NUST Institute of IT in collaboration with Dr. Hiroki Suguri, Vice president and CTO Comtec Japan, have resulted into an open source Multi Agent System SAGE (Scalable Fault Tolerant Agent Grooming Environment) for developing agent-based applications. Launching ceremony of indigenously developed Multi-Agent System: SAGE was held on 29 November 2004 at NUST Headquarters Rawalpindi. Market for the agent based application is growing very rapidly in the global market, where SAGE can play very crucial role for future intelligent application development. SAGE is a framework and it can be used to develop applications in a number of areas such as e-health, e-government and e-science. This agent platform is competitive to JADE a de-facto platform being currently used worldwide.

Mobile Technologies have gone through a revolution in the past three years and Pakistan has seen a phenomenal growth in mobile service subscribers in that period. NUST Institute of Information Technology has established a 3G Mobile Technologies Research Lab for research and experimentation in the vital areas like GSM and CDMA. In addition, NIIT has established an advanced network engineering research lab equipped with state-of-the-art ATM switch hardware received from CERN.