Saudi Arabian university funds research

STATE COLLEGE, Pa., March 13 (UPI) -- A Penn State scientist will receive up to $10 million from Saudi Arabia during the next five years to investigate microbial fuel cell technologies.

Penn State University officials said Professor Bruce Logan has been named one of 12 scientists to receive a Global Research Partnership Investigator award from the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology. His research will center on converting waste into electricity or hydrogen and, in the process, clean water.

King Abdullah University of Science and Technology is being developed as an international, graduate-level research university. The core campus, located on the Red Sea at Thuwal, Saudi Arabia, is to open in September 2009.

The other newly named Global Research Partnership investigators are from Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Oxford University, the University of Tokyo, the Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of Cambridge, the University of California-Berkeley, Sweden's Chalmers University of Technology, the University of Toronto, the California Institute of Technology and the University of Rome.