The Office of Faculty Research (OFR) is the designated office at ULAB committed to developing the scholarship of faculty members through research. The OFR envisions the development of an enabling and sustainable research infrastructure at ULAB which is at the core of the university’s mission, vision, and guiding principles. The main objective of the OFR is to mentor faculty members across disciplines on the rigors of writing research proposals, collecting and processing data, and writing research reports and publishable articles in refereed journals from the research projects undertaken with financial support from the university and beyond. The OFR is also dedicated to offering opportunities to faculty members in all academic units and encouraging participation in collaborative and interdisciplinary research projects, locally and internationally.

Being a liberal arts university, ULAB encourages its faculty to produce original work on areas such as:

1. Human impacts of and innovations in engineering, business practice, entrepreneurship, and information technology
2. Gender articulations, issues on children, the elderly, and persons with disabilities in different contexts
3. Perceptions of and human responses (adaptation and mitigation) to climate change, environmental threats and opportunities, costs and benefits of environmental protection and conservation
4. Media, culture and society, and multiple forms of their convergences
5. Innovations and assessment in teaching, including language and communication studies
6. Heritage (cultural, historical and natural) management; preserving and recording fragile heritage hubs
7. Issues in land use, rural and urban development, and sustainable agriculture initiatives
8. Critical understanding of the history of South Asian thought, languages and philosophies

Services and Resources

The Office of Faculty Research offers the following services and resources to aid in developing ULAB as a research-based university:

• Faculty Research Grant
• Capacity development through workshops on proposal writing and research methodology
• Guidance to faculty members in proposal writing, report writing, and fund hunting
• Enhancement of the quality of faculty publications (indexing databases)
• Predatory journal alert
• Ensuring the originality of knowledge (management of Turnitin Originality Checker)
• Notification of funding opportunities to faculty members through a grants database
• Cash and kind incentives scheme for quality publications
• Interdisciplinary Seminar Series
• Young Researcher’s Pool
• Development of and regular updates to a database on faculty members’ areas of specialization in research and publications