Senior United Arab Emirates educationalist presents Occasional Address

16 December 2002

The Occasional Speaker at the University of Wollongong's Engineering and Commerce graduation ceremony this afternoon, Dr Tayeb A.Kamali, from the United Arab Emirates, has wide-ranging involvement with the international business and educational communities.

Dr Tayeb A.Kamali, is the Vice-Chancellor of the United Arab Emirates' Higher Colleges of Technology (HRT), Director of Abu Dhabi Men's College and the founding member and Managing Director of the Centre for Excellence for Applied Research and Training (CERT).

The breath of his involvement can be seen in the range of organisations that have links to HRT and CERT including Intel, IBM, Lucent, Honeywell, Silicon Graphics, Harvard University and Northrop Grumman. He led the team that developed the vision for the first corporate university in the Gulf region and he is now Chairman of the Board of the Cert Thales Institute. In 1995, he established the first technology park in the region at CERT and, in 2001, the region's first online university, the Abu Dhabi Petroleum University.

In seeking to maintain a strong international perspective on management and education, Dr Kamali has been a regular visitor to leading international educational institutions, including a term as a Visiting Pro Vice-Chancellor (International) at UOW. In 2001, Dr Kamali was a Visiting Fellow at Pembroke College, Cambridge University, and he has been a participant in seminars at Cornell and Harvard universities.

Dr Kamili is also actively involved in a major conference to be held in Abu Dhabi, UAE, in February next year called E-ducation Conference 2003. Some UOW students will have the opportunity to participate in this conference which features as one of the keynote speakers Dr Edward de Bono who is regarded as one of the world's leading authorities in the field of creative thinking and the direct teaching of thinking as a skill. Nominated doctoral students will be able to attend the conference which has all fees, airfares, accommodation and on-ground costs covered.

The conference is an international student conference designed to promote Information Age skills, e-learning, networking, and collaboration of teams working across national and linguistic borders. Dr Kamali flew out especially from the Emirates to present the Occasional Address.