with the goal to become one of the top performing higher education institutions worldwide as an apex university usm has set forth an agenda transforming higher education for a sustainable tomorrow in order to support the drive to improve the wellbeing of humanity the bottom billion the strengthening of the postgraduate programmes in medical health life sciences health sciences engineering and technology and information technology is directly in line with regional priorities developing the pool of highlyqualified researchers and engineers is critical to the capacity of the region to compete on the basis of design and development and innovation in the electrical and electronics industry and other industries