PROF. DR. RAUZAH BINTI HASHIM

Rauzah Hashim developed her interest in computational science, since her days in the University of Southampton, B.Sc. (1980) and Ph.D (1985),  and with a thesis entitled "The Compter Simulation of Model Liquid Crystals". “Strange as it may seemed now, prior to 1990, computational science was unheard of in Malaysia”,  but  this did not deter her from pursuing the same research in simulation and modeling of materials, making her the pioneer in this field in Malaysia. In those days she faced scientific isolation and lack of general facilities in computing.

Unconventionally, she rectified the "scientific isolation issue" by seeking external grants and continuing her collaborations with her fellow researchers all over the world. These activities turned out to be useful in the later years, as she built up an extensive network of international research collaboration and developed her own internationalization capacity, which enabled her to make  "the whole world her laboratory". 

In addition, and quite unusual for a chemist, she set up the Internet facility in her department in 1992 (the kimia network, @kimia.um.edu.my, with over 70 nodes). The kimia network was four years ahead of the University Malaya campus wide network (1996).  In fact the @kimia.um.edu.my was probably amongst the earliest network in the world to provide direct internet accessibility to faculty members from their individual office rooms.  From 1990, for 10 years, Rauzah, tirelessly conducted seminars and workshops to popularize the computational science in Malaysia. Subsequently many High Performace Computer centers were established reflecting her ideas, including the MIMOS High Performance Center (2003). She was a member of the University of Malaya Campus Network Technical Committee, the MIMOS GRID Initiative as well as a member of the ICS-UNIDO Expert Group for the Combinatorial Chemistry and Related Sciences.

She obtained many external grants including those from the Royal Society of Chemistry United Kingdom, AbdusSalam, International Center for Theoretical Physics (Italy), Nippon Sheet Glass (Japan), she was a member of the "Intergrating Nanomaterials in Formulations" under the European Union Framework Program (EU-FP7) and was invited to the Beijing Chinese Academy of Science (Theoretical Physics). 

She won numerous local grants amounting to millions of Ringgit. In 2002, she led the MOSTI Top-Down strategic program “Glycolipid Science and Technology”.  This project developed and synthesized the nature-like branched-chain glycosides and had won many awards  including the Gold Medal and Special Award from Taiwan at the ITEX Geneva 2005. She also led another major grant, the High Impact Research (HIR) grant  on the Fundamental Science of Self-Assembly (2011-2016), the motto of “the future is now!”.  This means, her group, presently conduct and continuously seed future research. Rauzah's group contributed actively to high impact publications, and had contributed significantly to improve the University of Malaya's QS world ranking and it is now in the top 100 universities.  

Since 2016, she retired from the goverment full professorship position and is now an honarary Professor to the University of Malaya, but she continues her membership in the Centre forFundamental and Frontier Sciences in Nanostructure Self-Assembly, a center she built. She continues to publish with her group members and collaborators (old and new ones) from all over the world and on a variety of research topics.

She has over 100 scientific papers in high impact peer reviewed journals (H-index 24, on the Web of Science). And she writes popular science articles in the local mass media. 

She was a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRSC), a Chartered Chemist (C. Chem) and a Chartered Scientist (C.Sci).  She is a Fellow of the Academy of Science Malaysia (FASc).