The Uni­ver­si­ty of Trinidad and To­ba­go (UTT) and Lake As­phalt of Trinidad and To­ba­go (LATT) have signed a Mem­o­ran­dum of Un­der­stand­ing (MoU) with the in­ten­tion of co­op­er­at­ing on a num­ber of ob­jec­tives re­lat­ed to the trans­fer of knowl­edge be­tween both en­ti­ties.

Ac­cord­ing to a re­lease, ini­tial re­search will cen­tre around tran­si­tion­ing LATT’s op­er­a­tions to align with ob­jec­tives out­lined in the Na­tion­al De­vel­op­ment Strat­e­gy: Vi­sion 2030, Trinidad and To­ba­go’s Na­tion­al En­vi­ron­men­tal Pol­i­cy, the UN’s 2030 Agen­da for Sus­tain­able De­vel­op­ment, the Paris Agree­ment and the UN Frame­work Con­ven­tion on Cli­mate Change.

Pro­fes­sor Re­an Ma­haraj, Process En­gi­neer­ing, UTT, re­searcher on as­so­ci­at­ed projects, stat­ed this tran­si­tion would re­quire the in­tro­duc­tion of new prod­ucts, and re­brand­ing of cur­rent ser­vices, to en­sure con­sis­ten­cy with statu­to­ry re­quire­ments.

To this end, UTT will pro­vide req­ui­site knowl­edge and ex­per­tise to en­sure these needs are ful­filled, which in turn, will pro­vide ac­cess to train­ing and up­skilling for fac­ul­ty.

Sweda­ka Matthews, Chief Ex­ec­u­tive Of­fi­cer (Ag.), LATT, added that it is the role and re­spon­si­bil­i­ty of both lo­cal in­sti­tu­tions, to ex­plore op­por­tu­ni­ties and ful­fil their po­ten­tial in re­search and de­vel­op­ment, to the ben­e­fit of Trinidad and To­ba­go. This thought was echoed by UTT Pres­i­dent, Pro­fes­sor Prakash Per­sad who added that UTT was es­tab­lished pri­mar­i­ly for this pur­pose; to con­duct re­search, and take it for­ward.