PESHAWAR: After his appointment as pro-vice chancellor for a term of two-years, Prof Dr Muhammad Abid on Friday assumed charge as the acting vice-chancellor of the University of Peshawar.
He would serve as acting vice-chancellor of the oldest and largest general university in the province till the appointment of full-time vice-chancellor.Prof Abid is also the dean faculty of numerical and physical sciences at the University of Peshawar.
The appointment of pro-vice-chancellor of the university had been under process for the last nine months. The Higher Education Department had proposed the names of Prof Dr Amir Nawaz Khan, Prof Dr Abid, Dr Bashir, Dr Bushra Hameed and Dr Zafar Iqbal for the position.
Dr Amir Nawaz retired from service in January last and thus his name was dropped from the list of prospective candidates for the vice chancellor’s office. Some political wrangling for getting the position did take place even after the retirement of Dr Amir Nawaz, but finally Dr Abid was appointed the pro-vice chancellor.
Dr Abid is among the senior most deans and faculty members of the university. Hailing from Kharkai village in Dargai area in Malakand, he got his early education from his native village. He did his matriculation from Government High School Dargai in 1977. He completed his intermediate and graduation from Jahanzeb College Swat and got admission in Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad wherefrom he did his master’s in computer science in 1984. Soon after doing his M.Sc, Dr Abid joined the University of Peshawar as a lecturer.
In 1986, he went to England for higher studies where he did his PhD on Artificial Intelligence with the sub-specialty of Natural Language Processing from Cranfield University. After completion of his PhD, he returned to Pakistan in 1990 and rejoined his department.
In 1992, he was promoted as assistant professor and in 1995 he became associate professor. The same year he went to Jordon where he served in the Al-Isra University as an associate professor from 1995 to 1998.In 2001, he joined the National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences, Peshawar campus as one of the founding directors. He served in this capacity until September 2004.
Dr Abid was elevated to the position of professor in 2009. In 2015 he was made dean faculty of numerical and physical sciences. He has served as chairman of the Department of Computer Science, University of Peshawar, for 13 long years. He also remained member of the university’s Senate and Syndicate for nearly 15 years. He has been member of Pakistan Computing Council for the last 12 years.
