The Higher Education Commission has approved 1,104 competitive research grants for the year 2017-18 under the National Research Projects for Universities (NRPU) out of a total 2,722 submitted by faculty from 115 universities in the country. The University of the Punjab (PU), the largest university in the country with over 450 PhD teachers, has won 44 of these grants (i.e., less than 4% of the total approved), a considerable improvement over 15 grants that it had won for the year 2016-17. The grant proposals were submitted in October 2017. The 1,104 approved projects include 37 in the area of Computer Science and Information Technology (CS/IT), which forms less than 3.5% of the approved projects. The Punjab University College of Information Technology (PUCIT) faculty has won five of these grants amounting to approximately Rs. 15 million, thus winning more than 13.5% of the total approved grants in CS/IT. The college faculty had submitted a total of seven grant proposals. Thus, their success rate is over 71%, compared to 32% overall for PU faculty. For the year 2016-17, the PUCIT faculty had won three NRPU grants amounting to over Rs. 12 million, the largest by any academic department at PU. Like for the year 2016-17, PUCIT faculty’s share of PU’s approved grants is around 12%. Of the 37 grants for CS/IT, PUCIT wins 5 while receiving Rs 15M Through these grants, Dr. Shahid Farid, Dr. Shahzad Sarwar, Dr. Laeeq Aslam, Dr. Imran Farid Khan, Dr. Mehvish Poshni, Dr. Khurram Shahzad, Dr. Muhammad Kamran Malik and Dr. Nazar Amin Khan will conduct research in the area of Computer Vision, Cellular Networks, Graph Theory, Business Process Modeling, Natural Language Processing, and Digitization of Maps. The grants will support around 15 graduates, PhD and MPhil students for two years or more. The college also won a Rs. 98 million competitive research grant from HEC for establishing a national lab in Artificial Intelligence in 2017. During Dr. Syed Mansoor Sarwar’s tenure as Principal PUCIT, the college won over Rs. 139 million in competitive research grants through HEC, the highest by any academic unit of PU. Published in Daily Times, February 9th 2019.