Asia e University

24/07/2026

Forging Stronger Global Academic Partnerships:

AeU and UNISMUH Makassar Chart the Next Phase of International Collaboration

On 23 July 2026, Asia e University (AeU), Malaysia, was honoured to welcome the delegation from Universiti Muhammadiyah Makassar (UNISMUH Makassar), Indonesia, led by its Rector, Dr. Ir. H. Abd. Rakhim Nanda, ST., MT., IPU. The delegation also comprised Dr. Ir. Nurnawaty, ST., MT., IPU. (Head of Integrated Laboratory), Ir. Syafaat S. Kuba (Dean, Faculty of Engineering), Dr. Maharida Manindar (Chair, International Office), and
Dr. Andi Ade Amrini (Rectorate Staff).

The meeting was chaired by our Vice Chancellor (VC), Prof. Dr. Noor Raihan Ab. Hamid, with the academic engagement led by the Dean, School of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Technologies (SAiDTech), Prof. Ts. Dr. Aedah Abd Rahman, who coordinated the participation of representatives from all schools: the School of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Technologies (SAiDTech), School of Management (SOM), School of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (SAHUSS), School of Graduate Studies (SGS), and School of Professional and Executive Education Development (SPEED). The discussions were further enriched by the active contributions of the Deans, Heads of Department, Programme Coordinators, and staff from both universities.

Their professionalism, valuable insights, and the warm hospitality extended throughout the visit, including the campus tour, reflected AeU’s strong commitment to fostering meaningful international partnerships, academic excellence, and global engagement.

The visit marked another significant milestone in strengthening the strategic partnership between our institutions following the successful signing of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) last year. Discussions centred on preparations for the forthcoming Memorandum of Agreement (MoA) and explored a wide range of collaborative initiatives, including joint academic and dual-degree programmes, micro-credential offerings, collaborative research and publications, staff and student mobility and exchange, cross-institutional teaching, visiting and adjunct academic appointments, postgraduate research supervision, external examiner appointments, joint webinars and conferences, professional development and capacity-building initiatives, international corporate social responsibility (CSR) programmes, cultural exchange activities, and other strategic collaborations that advance academic excellence, innovation, and global engagement.

We look forward to formalising this collaboration through the upcoming MoA and translating our shared vision into impactful initiatives that create lasting value for our students, academics, and both institutions.

17/07/2026

Strengthening International Academic Collaboration

On 16 July 2026, Asia e University (AeU), Malaysia and Universitas Pamulang (UNPAM), Indonesia marked a significant milestone in international higher education through the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) in Subang Jaya, Selangor, Malaysia.

The MoU provides a comprehensive framework for collaboration in teaching and learning, joint research, student and staff mobility, academic and cultural exchange, curriculum development, professional development, and other initiatives of mutual interest. Through this partnership, both universities aim to enhance educational quality, strengthen institutional capabilities, and create greater opportunities for innovation and knowledge sharing across borders.

The MoU Signing Ceremony was chaired by Prof. Ts. Dr. Aedah Abd Rahman, Dean of the School of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Technologies (SAiDTech), Asia e University. The Universitas Pamulang delegation was represented by Selly Septiani, S.Si., M.Kom, Head of the Information Systems Programme, and Reni Haerani, S.Kom., M.Kom., Ph.D, underscoring the strong commitment of both institutions to fostering meaningful and sustainable international collaboration.

This partnership marks the beginning of a long-term strategic relationship that is expected to strengthen educational ties between Malaysia and Indonesia, promote collaborative research and innovation, facilitate academic mobility, and contribute to the development of globally competent graduates equipped to address future challenges.

Asia e University extends its sincere appreciation to the university senior management, deans, heads of department, programme coordinators, faculty members, and staff from both institutions whose dedication and support made this milestone possible. We look forward to a productive and enduring partnership that delivers lasting benefits to our institutions, our students, and the wider academic community while contributing to the advancement of higher education in the region.

10/07/2026

Great leaders don’t just adapt to change—they create it.

The future of education needs visionary leaders who can inspire innovation, influence policy, and transform learning through research and strategic leadership.

🎓 Are you ready to take the next step in your leadership journey?

Join us for an exclusive FREE webinar and discover how the Doctor of Education (EdD) at Asia e University (AeU) can help you become a leader who creates meaningful impact in education and beyond.

🎙️ Featuring:
Prof. Dr. John Arul Phillips
Dean, School of Education and Cognitive Science

📅 18 July 2026 (Saturday)
⏰ 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM (Malaysia Time)
💻 Online | FREE Admission

Whether you’re a:
✨ School Leader
✨ Lecturer or Academic
✨ Education Professional
✨ Trainer or Consultant
✨ Policy Maker
✨ Aspiring Educational Leader

This webinar will provide valuable insights into how an EdD can strengthen your leadership capabilities, enhance your research expertise, and open new opportunities for career advancement.

🎯 Seats are limited! Register today and take the first step towards becoming an education leader who shapes the future.

🔗 Register now: https://lnkd.in/gpWfCdgZ

hashtag hashtag hashtag hashtag hashtag hashtag hashtag hashtag hashtag hashtag hashtag hashtag hashtag hashtag hashtag hashtag

06/07/2026

Words of Our PhD Alumni: Different Paths, One Pursuit

From Classroom to Founder

Dr Ansab Khalid didn't set out to build a company. As Head of the Department of Psychology, he began his PhD in Social and Behavioural Sciences with one goal in mind: to deepen his academic career. The plan was straightforward, more research, more credibility, more standing in the classroom he already called home.
The research had other plans.

His dissertation explored something unusual: a psychometric tool for identifying leadership potential through LinkedIn profile pictures. It was the kind of research question that sits right at the edge of psychology and the modern workplace and the deeper he went into it, the more he realised organisations didn't just want a single assessment tool. They needed ongoing support: training, coaching, a way to act on what the data told them. The gap between what he was researching and what the market actually needed became impossible to ignore.

So, while still a doctoral student, he did something he hadn't planned for. He founded Psywork Consultants, a firm built on the exact insight his research had surfaced, applying psychological expertise to real organisational problems: psychometric testing, leadership development, emotional intelligence training, and one-to-one mental health support for corporate employees.

Running a growing company while completing a PhD is not a simple balancing act. There were semesters where his research, his academic responsibilities, and his business all competed for the same hours. What made it possible, he says, was a doctoral structure flexible enough to bend around a life that refused to stay in one lane.

It worked. By 2025, Psywork Consultants had partnered with more than ten international organisations, supporting over 500 employees worldwide, many of whom report measurable gains in leadership skills, resilience, and job satisfaction.
Looking back, Dr Ansab doesn't see his PhD as simply an academic milestone. He sees it as the unexpected starting point of an entrepreneurial life he never planned for, but wouldn't trade.

Don't listen to us. Listen to our alumni.

03/07/2026

Words of Our PhD Alumni: Different Paths, One Pursuit

From Self-Doubt to Doctor of Philosophy

Dr Shiveh Sivalingam describes her doctoral journey as an expedition into uncharted territory, and for a long stretch of it, she wasn't sure she'd make it out the other side.
In the early months of her PhD in Education, under the supervision of Professor Siow Heng Loke, the demands of original research and rigorous methodology felt insurmountable. The self-doubt was intense enough that she questioned whether she had overestimated her own capacity. Then, unexpectedly, COVID-19 arrived, and with it, something she still calls a paradox she's grateful for: time. The lockdowns gave her the space to finally bring her research proposal to life.

The hard parts didn't disappear, though. Data that refused to behave. Drafts returned covered in her supervisor's sharp, exacting feedback. Each setback felt like a small failure, but slowly became something else, a lesson in humility, and eventually, a source of strength. She began to see the difficulty itself as part of the point: growth, she realised, happens at the edges of discomfort, not in spite of them.

She didn't do it alone. Her students' curiosity reminded her why the work mattered. Friends outside academia kept her grounded in a life beyond the thesis. And her partner, Mr D. E. Silva, was the steady presence she leaned on hardest, checking in, encouraging balance, and standing beside her through the viva itself, the final, hardest test of the entire journey.

Her late father's belief in her, she says, never left her either.

What she takes from the experience isn't just a title. It's the understanding that knowledge alone was never the point, character, resilience, and the relationships that carried her through were. She became, in her words, not just a scholar, but a more resilient and humanly connected person.

Don't listen to us. Listen to our alumni.

01/07/2026

Words of Our PhD Alumni: Different Paths, One Pursuit

From a Fishing Village to a PhD at 60

Dr Gabriel Ang Lim grew up in Mukah, a small fishing town in Sarawak, where the idea of a PhD wasn't even on the horizon. Childhood there meant learning to swim well enough to catch fish and crabs from the nearby rivers, and helping his parents grow enough vegetables to get the family through the week. It wasn't an easy life, but it's one he remembers fondly.

The idea of a doctorate only took root years later, during his undergraduate studies at the University of Malaya, watching lecturers who held PhDs and master's degrees ignite a hunger for learning in their students. He carried that seed of a dream into the corporate world, where he later completed a part-time Executive MBA with the University of Bath while working full-time at a Japanese MNC.

Then life did what life does. Work pressures, raising a family, watching his children grow, his doctorate dream quietly slipped to the back of his mind. Not abandoned, just neglected, the way unfinished things often are.

By the time he turned sixty, he felt the truth of the old saying that time and tide wait for no man. He had built a respectable career, reached senior management, earned all the trappings of success, and still felt the tug of something unfinished.

He asked two people closest to him for honest advice. His brother, a senior executive who had done his own PhD part-time, was blunt: doing a PhD, he said, is like going to prison, tough, full of sacrifice, but you walk free once it's done. His sister, an academic in New Zealand, told him the opposite: it was entirely doable.

Both, he discovered, were right. The five years that followed were among the most demanding of his life, and also some of the most meaningful. He completed his PhD in Business Administration, and his thesis was nominated for the Best Thesis Award by the Examination Committee.

His story is a reminder that some dreams don't have an expiry date. They just wait for you to be ready.

Don't listen to us. Listen to our alumni.

26/06/2026

Words of Our PhD Alumni: Different Paths, One Pursuit

Dr Bilal Ahmad
From Practitioner to Policy Architect

By the time Dr Bilal Ahmad decided to pursue a PhD, he had already spent two decades inside the world he was about to study.

For 20 years, he had worked across Asia and Africa on access to finance for small and medium enterprises, the unglamorous, essential work of figuring out how money actually reaches the businesses that need it most. He had sat across the table from regulators, development banks, and entrepreneurs trying to keep their businesses alive. He didn't need a PhD to tell him the problems were real. He needed one to understand them with enough rigour that others would listen.

That decision meant the PhD had to fit into a life that didn't pause for it. There was no quiet campus routine, no fixed desk, no predictable week. Much of his dissertation was written in the in-between moments of a working life, on flights, in airport lounges, in hotel rooms between one consultation and the next. Progress came in fragments: an hour here between meetings, a late night after a long day of fieldwork.
What kept him going wasn't comfort, it was the conviction that the research mattered beyond the page. Every chapter he wrote was, in some way, a chapter he had already lived through in the field, he was simply learning to argue it with evidence instead of instinct.

That discipline paid off well beyond graduation. Since completing his PhD, Dr Bilal has gone on to design a major liquidity facility supporting MSMEs across Ethiopia, and has worked with the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and United Nations agencies on financial inclusion policy across multiple countries.
His story is proof that a PhD doesn't require stepping away from your career to study it, sometimes the most rigorous research happens in the cracks of a demanding professional life, written between flights instead of in a library.

Don't listen to us. Listen to our alumni.

25/06/2026

Words of Our PhD Alumni: Different Paths, One Pursuit

Dr Abdulqadir Sheikh Abubakar Hassan
From Somalia's Fragility to Its Financial Reform

There was a time when simply finishing a degree felt like an act of defiance.

Dr Abdulqadir Sheikh Abubakar Hassan grew up in a country still finding its footing after decades of conflict. Institutions were fragile. Systems that other nations took for granted, functioning ministries, reliable budgets, basic public trust, were things Somalia was still trying to rebuild. He didn't choose his field of study to chase prestige. He chose it because he had seen, up close, what happens when a country's financial systems fail its people.

By the time he enrolled in his PhD in Business Administration at AeU, he wasn't a student looking for direction. He was a practitioner looking for proof, a way to formalise what he had already seen on the ground into research that could hold up to scrutiny, and that others could build on.

The work was not easy. Research on governance in a fragile state means working with incomplete data, institutions still under construction, and questions that don't have tidy academic precedents. There were long stretches where progress felt invisible. But he kept returning to the same question: if not now, when? If not him, who?

That persistence shaped a dissertation that didn't stay on a shelf. It became a working reference for real reform. Today, Dr Abdulqadir advises Somalia's Federal Parliament on public financial management. He has worked alongside the Ministry of Finance, contributed to USAID-funded governance initiatives, and supported UN-Habitat's community livelihood programmes.

He is, in many ways, still doing the same work his dissertation set out to do, except now the canvas is a country, not a chapter.

His story is a reminder that a PhD doesn't have to be abstract to be rigorous, and it doesn't have to come from a place of comfort to be excellent. Sometimes the most demanding research comes from the most demanding circumstances — and that is exactly what makes it matter.

Don't listen to us. Listen to our alumni.

24/06/2026

22/06/2026

Discover Your Entrepreneurial Potential with AYECA – FREE for Youth Across Asia!

Asia e University (AeU) is proud to collaborate with the Asia Institute for Sustainability, Entrepreneurship and Diplomacy (AiSED) in launching the Asia Youth Entrepreneurship Competency Assessment (AYECA) — a comprehensive assessment designed to help young people uncover their entrepreneurial strengths, readiness, and potential.

Whether you aspire to start a business, lead innovative projects, or simply explore your entrepreneurial capabilities, AYECA provides valuable insights into:

✅ Entrepreneurial Mindset
✅ Entrepreneurial Skills
✅ Entrepreneurial Readiness
✅ Real-World Business Decision-Making

More than just an assessment, AYECA helps identify your unique entrepreneurial profile and guides you towards suitable development pathways, mentoring opportunities, and entrepreneurship programmes.

Who should take it?
Youth aged 15 to 40 years old across Asia.

No Cost. No Commitment. Just Valuable Insights.

Take the assessment today and discover where you stand on your entrepreneurial journey.

Take the FREE AYECA Assessment here:
https://ayeca.aised.net/

Together, AeU and AiSED are committed to empowering the next generation of entrepreneurs with the confidence, competencies, and mindset to thrive in an innovation-driven future.