MBRSC launches third REU Program

DUBAI / Emirates Business

The Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre (MBRSC) launched the third cycle of the Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program, offering Emirati undergraduate students the opportunity to intern at Space Science research centers in the United States, as well as at MBRSC.
The program aims to expose undergraduate Emarati students to planetary science research and provide them an insight into the career of a planetary scientist. The program is open to undergraduate students majoring in Mathematics, Physics, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Chemical Engineering, and Electrical Engineering.
The program runs for 8 to 10 weeks that kicks-off with an introductory workshop, covering a range of topics in planetary science and the tools used for scientific analysis. Following that, each student is assigned a mentor and a project to work on for the duration of the internship. Students are encouraged to submit their research to international conferences with a chance to attend a conference if their submission is accepted.
Commenting on the launch of the third cycle of the program, His Excellency Yousuf Hamad Al Shaibani affirmed that training and development opportunities offered by programs such as REU are considered an important and ambitious steps towards the development of young scientific minds, as well as building up a distinct scientific community in the UAE.
“Offering students the opportunity to be mentored by leading space researchers and scientists allows them to exclusively obtain extensive scientific information, and in the past two cycles of the REU program, the Emirati students have proven their capabilities and skills with respect to the research papers in which they took part of,” he said.
Praising the rapid development of the MBRSC team, Al Shaibani added: “Members of our team have not only become role models for the youth in the UAE and the Arab world, they have also become mentors in the space science field”.
“The UAE has high ambitions for the space sector, and launching satellite projects and conducting space-related research papers are only the beginning of our nation’s journey towards the vast space exploration. This requires us to start building the capacities of the next generation of the Emirati scientists right away,” Al Shaibani concluded.
For his part, Omran Sharaf, Project Manager of the Emirates Mars Mission (EMM) – Hope mission, said: “In the last two years, 9 Emirati students were mentored by world-renowned planetary scientists and have published the results of their work in two international conferences in Space
Science.”
He also stressed that the EMM science team, for the first time, will work with students and share their experiences from the mission. This is to provide the students with a glimpse of work on EMM. Students who wish to join the REU program, are kindly requested to send their statement of intrest to reu@mbrsc.ae, no later than February 7.