The Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria is to upgrade its research laboratories and inculcate the culture of sharing such facilities among researchers and other scientists from within and outside.
Its Vice-Chancellor, Prof. Kabir Bala, stated this on Monday in Zaria while inspecting prototype ventilators and hand sanitisers manufactured by the institution.
The machines were manufactured by a team of scientists and engineers from the university at the Equipment Maintenance and Development Centre (EMDC), in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
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According to the Vice-Chancellor, the decision to upgrade the laboratories was necessitated by the need to make the university more efficient and effective in discharging its three core mandates of teaching, research and community service.
Bala explained that the university would meet with its chief technologists to know the exact state of laboratories in the university with a view to upgrading them in line with global best practices.
The Vice-Chancellor said that ABU would further develop its research and innovation centre by fitting in all the needed facilities to achieve the desired objectives.
Bala said that the research and innovation centre in conjunction with the Intellectual Property Technology Transfer Office would work towards patenting all the inventions of the university.
He said the institution would equally work hard to attract funding for research purposes in order to survive.
Bala said that most universities in developed nations survive largely on research grants from well established mega industries and foundations.
He expressed the commitment to ensuring that the research facilities that abound in the university were fully utilised.
In his remarks, the Director, ABU Equipment Maintenance and Development Centre, Prof. Muhammad-Sani Sallau, said the centre was able to manufacture a prototype ventilator – ABUVENT -20, and a hand sanitiser machine christened ‘ABUSANIT-20’.
Sallau said ABUVENT-20 and ABUSANIT-20 were manufactured in April as part of the centre’s contribution towards the containment of COVID-19 pandemic.
Sallau described the team of engineers and scientists that invented the machines as “wonderful”, saying that they worked round-the-clock to achieve the feat.