SVU plans to step up research activities, eyes holistic development

Tirupati: Sri Venkateswara University (SVU) has been making rapid strides moving towards holistic idea of development by having different centres of excellence, innovation and incubation centres and foreign collaborations. Efforts are at an advanced stage to set up different centres of excellence both in science and arts streams which will facilitate the faculty to pursue collective research and place the university at an advantageous position.

The university has been doing well on the research front and the faculty members are having good publications with its Scopus h-index being 104 which is an indication of quality of publication. They have around 10,000 publications till now in Scopus and other cited journals with high impact.

Though the independent research is going well, the university proposed to have a collective research with various groups by establishing centres of excellence. Vice-Chancellor Prof K Raja Reddy and Registrar Prof O Md Hussain have laid serious focus on this to make it a reality very soon.

Disclosing the details, the Dean, Research and Development Prof S Vijaya Bhaskara Rao told The Hans India that the university administration has proposed to start seven centres of excellence in Micro Nano satellites centre, Earth Sciences and Atmospheric laboratory, Material Science laboratory, Virus like particles (VLP) technology, Herbal drug, Bioenergy and Health Sciences centre.

In arts department, a centre of excellence in contemporary literature, another centre for communication skills, personality development and employability skills and centre for Industrial automation have been planned. The sophisticated equipment costing about Rs 14 crore required for these centres will be procured very shortly and once it is ready the research process can commence.

Apart from this, SVU is having collaboration with the North–Eastern University, USA and Purdue University, USA. Under the science collaboration with Purdue University, a group of faculty members can visit their laboratories to make research collaborations and take their help in commercialising our innovations and technology in which they are experts.

As North-Eastern University is known for entrepreneurial development, using the collaboration, SVU wants to advance in that area for which they started an e-club too. Prof Vijay Bhaskar Rao also said that in the next one or two months they are going to recruit staff for these innovation centres at various levels.

In the next one year, at least 5-6 innovation and incubation centres including IOT technologies and Drone technologies have been planned. The Dean revealed that SVU was also selected for the Multidisciplinary Education and Research Universities (MERU) project under which it will have multidisciplinary and multi institutional research by collaborating with IITs, IISERs and other universities.

"With these initiatives the university is contemplating to introduce new courses like Tourism and Hospitality Management, Drones and e-Mobility, Banking and Financial management, Business Analytics and IT Management etc., apart from conventional courses hopefully from next academic year. The ultimate goal is to place the university at a better position in NIRF and world rankings by fulfilling all the components," he maintained.