Winners of El Hassan Bin Talal Award for Scientific Excellence honored

Amman: HRH Prince El Hassan Bin Talal, chairman of the Higher Council for Science and Technology (HCST), on Thursday honored the winners of El Hassan Bin Talal Award for Scientific Excellence for the years 2023-2024, in the presence of Her Highness Princess Sarvath El Hassan. The 2023 award was allocated to Jordan's public education institutions, excluding vocational sector, while 2024 award was exclusively granted to the Kingdom's higher education institutions without technical education. Addressing the honoring ceremony, His Highness stressed the importance of relying on excellence and innovation in the education, training, health and agriculture fields. Noting necessity of supporting Jordanian youth by enhancing competency-based competitiveness, His Highness said relying on an integrated development plan and building on sound foundations are key to exploit the Kingdom's diverse investment opportunities. His Highness also renewed the call to create a base and center for scientific data, based on reliabl e information, pointing out that achieving stability and development comes by rearranging priorities and eliminating information-based competitiveness. For his part, HCST Secretary-General, Dr. Mashhour Rifai, said the award is a "great" success story in the Kingdom and aims to encourage educational, scientific and technological activities in institutions concerned with education and training fields. Rifai pointed out that 13 universities submitted 32 projects for the award in the year 2024, as 3 projects from 3 universities won. Last year, 78 projects from 73 institutions applied for the award, and 6 schools won. Hashemite University won the first award for the year 2024 for its project: "National Seed Bank," while the second prize went to Al-Hussein Technical University for its project: "Skills Improvement Program", and the third was granted to Jordan University of Science and Technology (JUST) for its project: "Royal Initiative to Support Creative Projects in Nanotechnology". Source: Jordan News Agenc y