TEHRAN –Razi Sheikholeslami, assistant professor of the civil engineering department at Sharif University of Technology, has won the Early Career Research Excellence Prize awarded by the International Environmental Modelling and Software Society (iEMSs).

Sheikholeslami is the assistant professor of the Environmental and Water Resources Engineering, Civil Engineering department. He won the prize for a significant contribution to environmental modeling and software, IRNA reported.

In 2021, he also received the most-cited article awards for two of his articles published in the Journal of Environmental Modeling and Software and best Referee from the society.

iEMSs is a not-for-profit organization uniting private persons and organizations dealing with environmental modeling, software, and related topics.

One of the aims of the iEMSs is to develop and use environmental modeling and software tools to advance science and improve decision-making with respect to resource and environmental issues.

This places an emphasis on interdisciplinarity and the development of generic frameworks and methodologies that integrate models and software tools across issues, scales, disciplines, and stakeholders with respect to resource and environmental issues.

It also promotes contacts among physical, social, and natural scientists, economists, and software developers from different countries and coordinates their activities.

Another goal is to improve the cooperation between the sciences and decision makers/advisors on environmental matters, and exchange information in the field of environmental modeling and software among scientific and educational organizations and private enterprises, as well as non-governmental organizations and governmental bodies.

To achieve the goals, the society organizes international conferences, meetings, and courses in environmental modeling and software.

Also, the society publishes scientific studies and popular scientific materials in the Environmental Modelling and Software journal (Elsevier). It hosts a website that allows members to communicate research and other information relevant to the Society’s aims with one another and the broader community.

900 Iranians among 1% most-cited researchers

“A total of 938 Iranian researchers have been recognized among the world's top one percent most-cited researchers in 2023,” the head of the Islamic World Science Citation (ISC) Institute said.

“The Ministry of Science, Research and Technology represents 40 percent, and the Ministry of Health, Treatment, and Medical Education accounts for 48 percent of the most-cited Iranian researchers,” ISNA quoted Ahmad Fazelzadeh as saying.

In 2023, 938 top researchers affiliated with Iranian organizations were identified, which marked a 12 percent increase compared to the previous year.

Over the past decade, the number of highly-cited researchers in the country has been growing. Medicine and Health with a 33 percent share, Multidisciplinary with 23 percent, Engineering with 20.5 percent, Basic Sciences with 12 percent, Agriculture and Environment with 10 percent, and Social and Human Sciences with 1.7 percent held the highest shares of the most-cited researchers, respectively.

One of ISC’s main responsibilities is to introduce highly-cited researchers and to provide the possibility to identify and introduce elite researchers and scholars. That is why scientific elites are the most important factor in the growth and development of scientific systems, and the number of institutions and highly-cited researchers is one of the criteria of scientific authority in the world.

The ISC Institute extracted and monitored the latest list of the world's top 1 percent most-cited Iranian researchers in 22 science subject areas based on the Essential Science Indicators (ESI) database.

In 2023, the University of Tehran, Tarbiat Modares University and Amirkabir University of Technology from the Ministry of Science, Research and Technology, and Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Kermanshah University of Medical Sciences and Tabriz University of Medical Sciences from the Ministry of Health, Treatment, and Medical Education had the highest number of one percent researchers.

Based on 22 subject areas, 23 percent of these researchers belonged to the field of Clinical Medicine. The field of multi-disciplinary subjects with 22.6 percent and engineering with 19 percent, were ranked second and third in terms of having the greatest number of highly-cited Iranian researchers. These three fields accounted for about 65 percent of all highly-cited researchers in Iran.

MT/MG