LASeR

The Lebanese Association for Scientific Research (LASeR) promotes research, and later employment opportunities, for graduate students in Lebanon. In addition to empowering the graduates to study, pursue, and solve societal problems, LASeR aims to change the social dynamics of Lebanese society by challenging the monopoly and centralization of the education system, currently based on religious sectarianism rather than merit.  By challenging religious sectarianism while changing the nature and ability of the market to accommodate and be influenced by graduate research and its findings LASeR promotes social cohesion. This project also allows everyone to be a change-maker by localizing the opportunities for graduates, and in turn allowing students to participate in changing their country’s social dynamics and pursue existing societal problems. Through public-private and local-global partnerships, his vision enables local universities and NGOs to become active agents in entrepreneurial education and activity where marginalized youth are encouraged to bring out their innovative solutions. LASeR is aggregating marginalized talents in the higher education system in order to empower them to make themselves and society better off. He is linking their talents to the market, countering the current system of monopolization, and raising a generation of young adults who give scientific research a new, active, and practical meaning. His selection process is based on merit while utilizing the failed institutions to not only enable the dynamic, local markets but also effect change in society.

LASeR offers a wide range of opportunities that are otherwise inaccessible to those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. We enable these marginalized talents to be more entrepreneurial by creating an integrated system. In addition, we encourage them to be entrepreneurial by making them fund themselves and focus all their resources, no matter how small, on solving societal problems. The project continues to create a change in both the market and the field of graduate research by linking the two, changing the market to match the needs of graduate research. Moreover, it is creating additional economic forces to revive that kind of change in the market. We aim to build a sustainable architecture for the program based upon the current market and its strengths. The organization draws credibility to its local graduate research institution through the global graduate research community. It creates the graduate programs in order to fulfill and identify the gap or need in the market; these programs are created in partnership with European professors which also helps develop the capacity of local professors who collaborate with them. Then, the most qualified students apply and undergo a rigorous selection criterion to ensure adequate talents are selected to fill these market gaps.