As part of its latest 2018-2022 transformation strategy, Qatar University (QU) strives to become a world recognized research institution that drives multi- and interdisciplinary programs and maximizes research impact. This can be achieved by having access to state of the art facilities and through engagement with the brightest minds in different national and international research institutions. As institutions play a key role in encouraging and facilitating new collaborations, funding multi-institutional initiatives enables us to bring together the necessary expertise to address challenging research problems and encourage interdisciplinary research.

QU is currently ranked as a leading institution internationally in terms of global research partnerships, and is comprised with a diverse faculty who have the potential to infuse the academic and research activities with a global perspective, which complements the context of Qatar, that itself is an increasingly internationalized country. According to the past five years statistics, QU collaborated with 1787 worldwide institutions and around 4550 co-authored publications of which 2842 journal articles constituted the scholarly output from those collaborative research projects in different research themes . The vast majority of those collaborations were funded through the National Priorities Research Program (NPRP), the main funding program of Qatar National Research Funds. This constituted an evidence that QU and the international collaborating institutions have clearly recognized that research is crucial to solving today’s major grand challenges faced in collaborating countries’ institutions and that the solutions increasingly require working across boundaries, disciplines and borders between nations.

Qatar has experienced over the past two decades considerable rates of economic, environmental and social changes. This has led to the emergence of issues such as air pollution, water and land resources; food and water security, identity and other socio-economic challenges. With the decrease in funding from various funding agencies in the different countries including Qatar and realizing that these issues are considered as international challenges, creating a new funding scheme like the QU International Research Collaboration Co-Funds (QU-IRCC) is forged by the need to provide opportunities for Qatar and the participating countries seeking solutions to these global challenges and to build on the existing strong collaborations.

Fostering further collaboration between Qatar university and other universities is essential not only for consolidation of research efforts in areas that are high-priority to Qatar and those countries, but is also critical for facilitating researcher and student exchange, and providing an easily accessible platform for research training to graduate students and postdocs. Such collaborations can be expanded thoughtfully, resulting in a collaborative research platform that will lead to wider consortium for innovation, discovery & scholarly advancement with highly specialized research units in various disciplines in Qatar & the other countries from which the entire globe will benefit.

Since people are at the center of international collaborations, QU-IRCC will support the best researchers from QU and the other participating universities from around the globe to develop high-quality, high-impact research partnerships, and open up opportunities for international researchers to access a greater pool of QU partners for joint R&D collaboration. QU shall work with other regional & international universities and research partners to overcome this issue through developing joint funding program like the QU-IRCC which aims to make it simpler for QU researchers to collaborate with excellent research partners around the world, by supporting enabling activities and reducing barriers.