By CHEN HUIFEN

IN a move to attract more research scientists to Singapore, A*Star has signed a pact to allow students from UK's University of Sheffield here on a two-year attachment.

The attachment, part of their PhD training programme, will cover biomedical and physical sciences and engineering.

The A*Star-Sheffield Research Attachment Programme can be carried out at any of A*Star's 22 research institutes and aims to encourage collaboration and interaction between researchers here and in the UK.

A*Star chairman Lim Chuan Poh said: 'It is my hope that upon completion of their research attachment here, these students will act as bridges, forging ties between different research communities and building links between Singapore and the world.'

The students will be jointly supervised by senior scientists from A*Star and professors at the University of Sheffield. They will eventually be conferred a PhD degree from the university.

The two organisations already share a strong link through Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology (IMCB) deputy director Philip Ingham. Recruited to join the Singapore body in 2006, Prof Ingham helped to set up the Centre for Developmental and Biomedical Genetics in Sheffield. His dual appointment as the centre's director helps promote collaboration between researchers from both sides.

The partnership with Sheffield is A*Star's first inbound research attachment programme. The agency has traditionally concentrated on outbound exchange schemes by its graduate researchers.

Under its A*Star Graduate Scholarship for PhD programme, scholars can opt to do two years' post-doctoral training at partner universities including Imperial College London, the University of Dundee, Cambridge University, Sweden's Karolinska Institutet and Carnegie Mellon University in the US.

This article was first published in The Business Times on October 17, 2008.