Seen from the air Malaysia’s capital Kuala Lumpur is surrounded by oil palm plantations. Down on the ground, inside the city, a green host of exotic flowers and plants appear wherever the shimmering skyscrapers and many tall buildings provide space for it. One of them is Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) which is the country’s premier research university in engineering and technology.

Sune Balle Hansen welcomes us wearing a long sleeve light blue shirt, dark pants and shoes in the
tropical heat. The 36 year-old environmental engineer from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) was employed as a research director at UTM one month before he completed his PhD on more environmentally friendly production of palm oil.

During the next three years, he will build a new research centre that can help to make Malaysia’s large palm oil production more sustainable as well as help uplift the country’s aspiration to be a renowned education hub in undergraduate, master and doctoral degree studies.

Malaysia has increased the number of PhD students tenfold in ten years. At UTM the increase is almost twentyfold. From 250 PhD students in the year 2000, the technical university has almost 4,455PhD students today, which correspond to the number at Harvard University in the United States. The number of universities in Malaysia is growing rapidly as well: in 1998 there were 11 universities in the country, all of which were public. Today there are 65, of which 21 are public and the rest are private and foreign university branches.

For Sune Balle Hansen, Malaysia’s rapid education boom has started him his very own research center. “So far, however, I am the only employee. The research center serves as a coordinating body for palm oil research at the university. Researchers from other faculties will be associated with the center on a project basis”, he explains. Sune Balle Hansen’s road to Kuala Lumpur and his own research center began as a bit of a coincidence but today he has been living in Malaysia for ten years and has a wife and children here.

“I had not really imagined myself as a researcher, but I’m really happy about it, because with this research, I follow my heart and work with something that can hopefully lead to environmental improvements,” says Sune Balle Hansen.

Over large plastic cups of freshly squeezed juice and plates with grilled chicken and rice, UTM’s outdoor canteen is alive with the Malay women’s patterned scarves among the black and white Middle Eastern ones. The university area has its own mosque, as the majority of Malaysians are Muslims, and most of the foreign students come from the Middle East, North Africa and Pakistan, Turkmenistan and Malaysia’s neighbouring countries.

Many of the foreign students fund their program with grants or family support from their home country, where there is often very limited possibility for obtaining a master’s or doctoral degree.
They travel to Malaysia mainly because of the relatively low tuition fees, explains UTM’s Vice Chancellor Zaini Ujang.

In Malaysia, the goal is to increase the research funding from one to two percent of GDP and reach 100,000 academic and professionals with a PhD in 2020, which provides ample opportunities for foreign students as well to get a doctorate degree in one of the country’s universities. At UTM, which has the largest number of PhD students in the country, 40% are foreigners. 20% of the master students are international. Students from less affluent Muslim countries choose Malaysia due to the fact that for many of them it is far easier to relate to the culture and development in Malaysia than in Europe and the United States.

“The differences are not so big here compared to where they come from, “says Zaini Ujang.
The large number of foreign students is, according to the Vice Chancellor, not to make money, but to establish international relationships.

“The business model is not about profit, but on long-term cooperation. We realize that many of the Ph.D. students who are trained here, are already in a position, in which they can make decisions relating to business consulting services and production in their home country. The advantage for us is that they already know Malaysia, and therefore often prefer to work with us rather than with other countries, “says Zaini Ujang.

From 11 to 65 universities
Although Malaysia’s universities are rapidly getting stronger, the UTM Vice Chancellor acknowledges that there is still a long way to international recognition.
“But if Singapore can do it, so can we,” says Zaini Ujang referring to the neighbourto the south who, despite their only five million inhabitants has achieved to get two universities in the top 100 of the world’s best universities in recent years. In Malaysia, the road to a quick lift in educational standard has also come through a two-fold increase in the number of foreign researchers in universities, explains Zaini Ujang who has recently completed a book on the Soul of Higher Education in Malaysia.

The Malaysian education boom really took off after the financial crisis in Asia in 1998. The plummeting foreign exchange rates meant that more than 100,000 Malaysian students in Europe and the United States could not afford to complete their master’s and doctoral degrees, says Zaini Ujang. Malaysia therefore opened up to the establishment of both private and foreign universities in the country, and the number of public universities has likewise grown from 11 to 21. The country’s 30 million inhabitants today have more than 65 public, foreign and private universities to choose from.

“So in many ways the currency crisis helped start the development of universities in Malaysia, “says Zaini Ujang.The tremendous growth in the number of universities also means increasing needs for researchers. Unlike in Denmark the PhD students here do not receive a salary.
The scholarships for the PhD students match with how talented they are, but do not notably exceed what other students get, making it much cheaper to educate more researchers. A sizable portion of the students travel abroad as part of the educational program.

“We want our students to be seen and experience other research environments, because we do not know what they want when they are finished with their PhD-education,” he says, and explains that UTM has collaborations particularly with England, Denmark and Sweden, where collaboration with Malaysian PhD students is attractive, in part because they are inexpensive.
“Many places in the world have difficulty hiring PhD students because of lack of research funds to pay their salary, but we can help with three free PhD students, who in turn get to be co-authors on international research papers, “says Zaini Ujang.

Henrik Søborg, who is development researcher at Roskilde University specializing in Southeast Asia, points out that Malaysia has had the largest and fastest growth in Higher Education in Southeast Asia in the last ten years, and that is could create quality problems.

“It is difficult to have a large growth within all levels in higher education and simultaneously make teaching and education better. Pricewise Malaysia tries to compete with countries like Singapore and Australia, who also have many foreign students, but many bachelor students in the country are so poorly trained that they find it hard to find employment. Malaysia emphasizes on quickly becoming a knowledge society, but the question is what the result will be when things have to move so quickly” says Henrik Søborg.

Sune Balle Hansen has experienced that the PhD students and Master students at UTM, who he is supervising, have another educational background than in the West.
“The difference is not so much in the academic skills, but primarily on the analytical level. Most people here have grown up with an educational system based on one-way communication. Although they are beginning to have more problem-based learning in universities, it is still to a large extent based on memorization and little critical approach and analysis. Therefore, I can feel that most students find it difficult to approach a problem they have not encountered before. In a scientific forum, however, it creates a good melting pot to have Western researchers with strong analytical skills and Asians with a strong book-based academic tradition, “says Sune Balle Hansen.
The road to palm oil
When Sune Balle Hansen wrote his Master thesis as an environmental engineer in 2002 he spent four months in Malaysia, found a girlfriend and returned to the country after his graduation to work as a research assistant on a project on environmental assessment of palm oil. The short, oil-rich palms covering 14 percent of Malaysia’s land area, also played a role in his next job where he developed waste water and biogas plants for palm oil industry. “I knew nothing about palm oil until then but I thought along the way that there were a lot interesting issues in the environmental challenges faced by the industry, so I wrote a proposal to DTU to do a PhD project on palm oil,” explains Sune Balle Hansen.

The response from DTU was a yes, but he had to find the research funding himself. Sune Balle
Hansen therefore contacted Shell and asked if they would help to finance a project focusing on the production of biodiesel from palm oil. Here the answer was also yes, and Sune Balle Hansen started his PhD project in 2009. Since then he has collected data from palm oil mills, plantations and other researchers, and conducted experiments to make biogas from residual product from the palm oil. The project resulted in a model for how the palm oil industry in Malaysia can become more sustainable through recycling of residual products and land conversion.

“Overall, the palm oil industry is only interested in this because there are more and more requirements, especially from Europe for Malaysia to document that the oil is produced in an environmentally sound manner. If they can’t do that, it is harder for them to sell their oil, “says Sune Balle Hansen.

When it says vegetable oil on our food products, then it is very likely palm oil, but the oil has a bad reputation in Europe because it has resulted in felling of rainforest in Malaysia and Indonesia, which produce about 90 percent of the world’s palm oil. The palm oil industry thus has an incentive to improve nature preservation.

Sune Balle Hansen has no doubt that palm oil, despite major environmental challenges also has significant advantages.”We need these oils in almost all of our food and you get four times as much oil per hectare from oil palms as from rape seed and ten times as much as from soy. That way you use much less land area than when you produce the other large vegetable oils. The problem is that the palms grow in these biodiversity hot spots, “says Sune Balle Hansen, who hopes that his research will help rectify some of the environmental load, caused by palm oil production today.

The fact that Malaysia is at the same time undergoing a rapid development in education and research makes it all the more exciting.“In Denmark you have to go out and find money every time you want do something, but out here you just need a good project, then the financing comes relatively easy. It gives a great faith in the future of the universities here that it is so relatively easy to find money for the next project,” says Sune Balle Hansen about the research environment at university facilities in Malaysia.

Source: http://ibureauet.dk/vsibureau/temaaviser/

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Sune Balle Hansen (PhD)

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