Research Grants

National Sustainable Agriculture Initiative – “READY” Project

UOWD congratulates Prof Balan Sundarakani, Professor in the School of Business, for his success as Project Director and Principal Investigator of the grant-funded project “READY – Resilient Agrifood Dynamism through Evidence-based Policies.”

Focused on strengthening the UAE’s long-term food security, READY combines partnerships with global Agri-Tech leaders to advance research into climate-resilient crops and AI-driven farming practices. The project assesses and enhances food security through four key pillars, Availability, Accessibility, Utilisation and Stability, aiming to improve efficiency, reduce resource use and boost yields, while helping the UAE reduce reliance on food imports and set a global benchmark for sustainable agriculture.

The project is funded by the Ministry of Education, Department of Science and Technology, UAE, with a grant amount of approximately AED 7 million. Key partner institutions include:

• International Center for Biosaline Agriculture (ICBA)
• Department of Food Security – Dubai Municipality
• Department of Food Science – United Arab Emirates University (UAEU)

Click here to learn more.

Emirates Foundation

The Emirates Foundation is a highly competitive grant scheme and one of the few sources of research funding in the UAE.

UOWD congratulates Dr Kathy Shen for her success as a Principal Investigator in gaining an Emirates Foundation grant of AED 179,712 for her project entitled “Social Networking Site Usage among UAE adolescents: Antecedents, Consequences, and Gender Differences” – with Prof Mohamed Khalifa (UOWD) and Prof Ping Zhang (Syracuse University, NY) as co-investigators.

Zayed University RIF Grant

UOWD researcher Dr Melodena Stephens Balakrishnan is part of a multi-national team (Michael, I., Balakrishnan, M.S., Sandhu, T., King, B. and Hassan, S.) that has been awarded AED 65,200 from the  Zayed University RIF Grant (2013-15) for the study “Creating the United Arab Emirates (UAE) Nation Brand”.

National Research Foundation

In 2013, Prof Valerie Lindsay and Dr Melodena Stephens Balakrishnan were awarded AED 160,000 for a University-Industry Research Collaboration Award (U-IRCA 2013) grant with Wamda, UAE. The study was entitled “How can the Scalability of Start-up Firms Engaged in Social Entrepreneurship be Increased?”

UOWD researchers fared extremely well in previous UAE National Research Foundation grant outcomes.

Their success rate in the ‘competitive’ and ‘highly competitive’ categories was 83% (5 of the 6 full proposals submitted by UOWD), which was well above the national average of 58%.

The following grants were rated as ‘highly competitive’** or ‘competitive’*:

UOWD congratulates these researchers on this recognition, at a national level, of their research abilities and the quality of their particular proposals.