Chemical education in the Philippines (Third of a series)

Development efforts

Over the last 28 years major development projects have been implemented to improve Chemistry education. 

In the late 60s and early 70s scholars were sent abroad for graduate training, funded by grants from abroad and local funds. Unfortunately, many of the scholars did not come back. Because of this very sad experience a group of scientists (Chemistry, Physics, Mathematics) from three major universities decided to pool their resources together as a consortium to set up local Ph.D. programs in Chemistry, Physics and Mathematics. Thus, the University of the Philippines-Ateneo de Manila-De La Salle University Ph.D. Consortium programs were born in the late 70s. Not one of the three had the faculty nor the facilities to offer a quality Ph.D. program so all resources were shared. The first group to implement a program was Mathematics in 1978, followed by Chemistry in 1981 and Physics in 1982.

At the start the Chemistry group chose only two major areas of research, Natural Products and Electroanalytical Chemistry, where we had groups of faculty members in at least two of the universities already doing research. However, our facilities were not enough to do internationally acceptable dissertation research so we implemented what is now known as a “sandwich” program. Under this program most, if not all, the courses were taken in-country sometimes with the assistance of visiting professors from abroad. All or part of the dissertation research was done in a cooperating laboratory abroad under the co-advisorship of a Filipino professor and a professor from the cooperating laboratory. Before we sent students abroad we invited some professors to give research seminars in topics that were also of interest to us. While the student was doing research abroad we also sent the Filipino adviser to the cooperating laboratory to ensure proper coordination and to do post-doctoral research work. The defense was done in the Philippines with the foreign adviser serving as a member of the examination panel. To ensure quality, publication of the dissertation in a respectable international journal was required. We were lucky because at the time we started the program the Australian and Japanese governments had offered to give assistance for science to the Philippine government. We made sure that the assistance would be in the form of visiting professorships, faculty exchange and support for the dissertation research of our students. When the other governments (United States of America, Britain and Germany) saw that the program was successful they also offered to assist. Under this program we were able to graduate 22 Ph.D.s who now serve in the three universities and in other chemistry departments all over the country.

(To be continued)

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Dr. Ester Albano-Garcia is currently the president of the University of the East, a position she has held since 2006. She was chairman of the Commission on Higher Education from 1999-2003. From being chair of the UP Department of Chemistry in Diliman in the late 1970s, she was promoted to associate dean of the Natural Sciences and Mathematics division of the College of Arts and Sciences. She was assistant to the UP President for Science and Technology and a member of the Project Advisory Group of the World Bank Engineering and Science Education project of the DOST from 1993 to 1998, while simultaneously chairman of the CHED-DOST Technical Working Group. Albano-Garcia, together with other concerned scientists, was one of those who influenced the creation of the PhD consortium in chemistry, which to date has enabled the UP to graduate 25 PhDs in chemistry, bringing her closer to her vision of the “critical mass” that hopefully will one day put our country in the science and technology map.