My name is Ghada Bassioni, and currently I’m heading the chemistry division at the faculty of engineering at Ain Shams University in Cairo. I hold a joint appointment at the Science and Technology Development Fund, at the Ministry of Scientific research and Higher Education, coordinating the collaboration between Egypt and Germany, Egypt and Italy, and Egypt and Japan.

If you had just one criterium to propose to assess scientific excellence in your country, what would it be?

The term excellence is very relative. But maybe the SDGs would provide a very good platform to measure scientific excellence. So the Sustainable Development Goals that have been identified by the United Nations beeing 17, of relevance for the university ranking only 11 have been identified by the Time Higher Education. And I believe that this kind of tool will provide real impact on society that is related to science.

Interview by Luc Allemand