Monash University Malaysia, the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus and the University of Southampton Malaysia Campus, launched the MyMentor initiative recently at the Royale Chulan Kuala Lumpur. The launch was officiated by Datuk Seri Haji Idris Jusoh, Minister of Education, Malaysia. A six-year initiative, MyMentor is supported by the Ministry of Education. Its aim is to build research capacity in line with the goals of the recently published National Higher Education Blueprint. It seeks to partner public university academics who are recent PhD graduates with experienced scientists from the three participating private universities. This program aims to mentor 230 post-doctoral staff and produce more than 350 high quality journal papers.

British Council commentary:

MyMentor is seen as one of the initiatives from Ministry of Education Malaysia to help addressing one of the areas raised in the Higher Education Blueprint (2015-2025) that was launched on 7 Apr 2015 by the Prime Minister, which is:

“The talent pool of PhD students and world-class researchers is still smaller than that of many countries. Expanding the number of PhD candidates and graduates will require addressing challenges in recruiting, hiring, and retaining researchers due to internal bureaucracy and slow processes, and improving the quality of postdoctoral and postgraduate programmes.”

Currently, the Ministry’s R&D expenditure is being spread across a broad range of research areas. In contrast, the experience of other successful systems has shown the importance of resource concentration in a few priority areas. One of the reasons industry has a low appetite for investing in R&D is its poor understanding of R&D capabilities in academia, as well as the lack of a “matchmaking” scheme to bridge industry demand and academia expertise. In terms of setting national priorities, as published in the recently launched Malaysia Education Blueprint 2015-2025 (Higher Education), Malaysia has several plans, each of which has a prioritised set of research areas. However, further alignment across stakeholders is required to ensure consistency in focus. To be competitive globally, it will be important for Malaysia to concentrate its resources in a few research areas where Malaysia has particular strengths.