Industry And Academe

Sasol and AstraZeneca, two companies at opposite ends of the chemical enterprise and the globe, are joining with universities to help ensure a sustainable supply of trained researchers and engineers.

The South African chemical company Sasol says it will invest $35 million over the next eight years to establish teaching and research capacity in chemistry and chemical engineering at selected South African universities.

"The realization that our South African universities may not be able to fully provide Sasol's future manpower needs has resulted in us helping build strategic capacity through a university collaboration program," says Sasol Executive Director Nolitha Fakude.

Meanwhile, the Anglo-Swedish pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca is working with the U.K.'s University of Nottingham to single out potential medicines of the future. The work builds on a joint doctoral training center set up at the university last year and sponsored by AstraZeneca and the British government's Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council. The $5 million center is training 25 British pharmacy Ph.D. students over the next five years in targeted therapeutics.

Teams from the company and the school recently got together at an "ideas generation" event to identify new areas for research on various diseases. Amanda Zeffman, project officer at Nottingham, says the event was one of the first such meetings to take place in the U.K. between academics and scientists from industry.