LAHORE, Jan 19: Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif has sent his advice to the governor to appoint vice chancellors of two agriculture universities, recommending the candidates who had won top positions in the three-candidate panels sent by the Punjab government’s Search Committee.

Sources told Dawn that the chief minister had recommended University of Agriculture, Faisalabad, (UAF) VC Prof Dr Iqrar A. Khan for another term of four years.

For Arid Agriculture University, Rawalpindi, sources said, the chief minister had recommended Prof Dr Rai Niaz Ahmad for his appointment as VC. Prof Ahmad is currently serving as Dean Faculty of Agricultural Engineering and Technology, UAF.

Prof Iqrar A. Khan, in his first tenure, had guided the university to achieve new heights of excellence. In October last year, the UAF had surfaced among top 300 universities of the world on the basis of the Performance Ranking of Scientific Papers for World Universities conducted by the National Taiwan University Ranking.

The top 300 universities’ ranking published by the Higher Education Evaluation and Accreditation Council of Taiwan (HEEACT) had rated the UAF at 158th position with 14.96 quality points in the category of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences, followed by numerous famous universities of the world including the University of Oxford (with 14.88 points).

In February last year, the UAF had won the Islamic Development Bank award for science and technology in the category of “institutions having achieved outstanding contribution to a given discipline.”

The vice chancellor had received award worth US $100,000, a trophy and a certificate on the basis of varsity’s research publications, citation, foreign funding and research funding, exchange programmes, quality assurance criteria, PhD faculty ratio and faculty-student ratio. The university had 487 impact factor publications that had over 3,000 citations.

The chief minister’s advice for the appointment of the University of Health Sciences and the King Edward Medical University VCs was still awaited, they said. — MANSOOR MALIK