James Kon
Brunei Darussalam is rich in biodiversity with its unique position as the country with the largest biodiversity per unit area in the world. With international collaboration, we look forward to utilising this resource for technological insight, Universiti Brunei Darussalam (UBD) Assistant Vice-Chancellor (Global Affairs) Dr Joyce Teo Siew Yean said.
She made these comments as the guest of honour at the launching of an international workshop on Biodiversity and Bioinspiration yesterday.
The workshop seeking to come up with a roadmap for the development of bioinspiration is hosted by UBD in collaboration with Virginia Tech (VT) from January 9 to 13. Dr Joyce Teo Siew Yean also described the potential of Bioinspiration as limitless.
“Bioinspiration is an effectively limitless source of ideas,” she said.
The workshop aiming to explore the interaction of bioinspired engineering and biodiversity attracted around 50 scientists and researchers from UBD and International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), the United States (US) Navy and the American Society for Engineering (ASEE), US universities including Virginia Tech, Arizona State University, City University of New York, Cornell, Georgie Tech, Johns Hopkins, University of Akron and the Virginia State.
Participating universities from Asian countries and the United Kingdom include Hiroshima University in Japan, Indonesian Institute of Sciences, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Krea University of India, National University of Singapore (NUS), Prince Songkla University of Thailand, University of Bristol, University of Malaysia Sarawak and University of Science, Malaysia.
Bioinspiration is a rapidly growing area at the intersection of engineering and the life sciences seeking to use insights from a wide range of biological systems such as plants, animals or entire ecosystems to develop technical solutions.
The importance of bioinspiration, especially for designing complex systems that can meet current and future multi-faceted technological challenges, makes the world’s biodiversity a potential natural resource for technical innovation.
UBD and VT signed an MoU in 2019 and have since been working on several academic and collaborative research areas.
As part of the research collaboration, UBD has been hosting Fulbright professors from VT and students from various American universities such as VT, Brown University, University of Maryland, Duke University, Texas A&M University and University of Buffalo for their internship in UBD.
This will be further extended to the NUS and KAIST.
