Students Supervised

In my last post, I mentioned some of the management books that I have read. Here, I felt the need to say that I don't read them cover-to-cover and in fact, whenever I wanted to use something from the books (or advices from others), I do tend to do a rethink. For me, a lot of the materials tend to come off as common sense but appreciation is still due given that the authors (or editors) have tried to systematise them. Management is not my cup of tea but having got myself into it, I would not want to dismiss it as easy (like some people think) but in fact, there are a lot of hard decision-making, thoughts of different scenarios (to foresee outcomes) and much more difficult, owing up to the decision that you have made (which could have been wrong). I'm glad that I am no longer in management but over the years, I do feel the younger people need to learn the history (and lessons) behind past decision making and also the humility to appreciate that others have thinking capabilities (right or wrong) just as good as they are.

Fast forward to last Thursday, it was the viva of my PhD student Mohammed Abdulmalek Abdulraheem Ahmed, probably my last international student. Mohammed's work is on thermal field theory and not quite a field that I dabble for research in the past. Because of this, we decided to have his previous MSc advisor Madjid Ladrem (Taibah University) and Faqir Khanna (emeritus professor at University of Alberta), a well-known expert on thermal quantum field theory (see his book here). This is probably the second time I have done this, supervision in collaboration with overseas professors. The first would be for Hassan Amirhashchi, who wanted to do a PhD in cosmology, with co-supervisor Anirudh Pradhan, who visited us in INSPEM, several times. Mohammed was my 24th graduate student and my ninth PhD student that had me as the main supervisor. Here is a pic.

Note in the above, one can see Prof. Kwek in the viva session. For Mohammed, we had two overseas external examiners (Prof. Kwek & Prof. Farhan) and one internal examiner (Assoc. Prof. Zulkifly Abbas). This just goes to show that we had difficulties to get examiners from our local community (and is generally true for most of our theoretical students).

The rest of my students are listed below (there were others that had me as a supervisor committee member within and outside of UPM).

• Ahmed Bouketir (PhD, 2000), "Group-Theoretic Quantization on Spheres and Quantum Hall Effect"
• Toh Sing Poh (MSc, 2002), "Cosmic Crystallography: CCP-Index of Thurston Manifold"
• Abubaker Ahmed Mohamed Siddig (MSc, 2003), "Mathematica Packages for Solving Schrodinger Equation with One-Dimensional Rectangular Potentials"
• Aslam Abdullah (MSc, 2006), "Extending Bianchi’s Classification of Homogenous Three-Manifolds"
• Ch’ng Han Siong (MSc, 2006), "Accelerating Cosmologies with Extended Product Spaces"
• Nurisya Mohd. Shah (MSc, 2008), "Energy Eigenequation Expansion for a Particle in Singly Punctured Two-Torus and Triply Punctured Two-Sphere System"
• Toh Sing Poh (PhD, 2008), "Proofs of Kochen-Specker Theorem Using Projection-Valued Measure"
• Mazlinda Zainy (MSc, 2009), "The Discrete Phase Space for 3-Qubit and 2-Qutrit Systems Based on Galois Field"
• Abubaker Ahmed Mohamed Siddig (PhD, 2009), "Computation of Maass Cusp Forms on Singly Punctured Two-Torus and Triply Punctured Two-Sphere Using Mathematica"
• Siti Nurul Ain Hj. Zaiton (MSc, 2010), "Qutrits and Lie Algebra Structure on Tensor Product of SU(3)"
• Hassan Amirhashchi, (PhD, 2011), "New Anisotropic Cosmological Models and Two-Fluid Dark Energy Models"
• Mojtaba Aliakbarzadeh (MSc, 2011), "Generating Mutually Unbiased Bases and Discrete Wigner Function for Three-Qubit System"
• Lam Shi Xiang (MSc, 2013), "A Network Structural Analysis of Malaysian Stock Market with Edge Density Constraint"
• Chan Kar Tim (PhD, 2013), "Parallel Computation of Maass Cusp Forms Using Mathematica"
• Saeid Molladavoudi (PhD, 2013), "Symplectic Techniques in Geometric Quantum Mechanics and Nonlinear Quantum Mechanics"
• Ahmad Hazazi Ahamad Sumadi (MSc, 2015), "Canonical Group Quantisation on One-Dimensional Complex Projective Space"
• Syed Nasrullah Ali Qazi (MSc, 2015), "Two Fluid Scenario for Dark Energy Models in a Bianchi Type I Universe"
• Choong Pak Shen, (MSc, 2016), "Characterizing Two- and Three-Qubit Entanglement by Their Tensors"
• Nor Syazana binti Shamsuddin (MSc, 2017), "Maass Cusp Form on Asymmetric Hyperbolic Torus"
• Zurita binti Ismail (MSc, 2019), "Structure of Co-Authorship Network in UPM Journal Publication Database From 2007-2010"
• Siti Aqilah Muhammad Rasat (MSc, 2020), "The Role of Compositionality in Constructing Complementary Classical Structures Within Qubit Systems"
• Mohd Faudzi Umar (PhD, 2021), "Deformed Heisenberg Group for a Particle on Noncommutative Spaces via Canonical Group Quantisation and Extension"
• Umair Abdul Halim (PhD, 2021), "Classical Aspect of Uncertainty Principle for Spin Angular Momentum in Geometric Quantum Mechanics"
• Mohammed Abdulmalek Abdulraheem Ahmed (PhD, 2022), "Real-Time Thermal Field Theory and Applications"

Besides graduate students, I also took in three postdoctoral fellows namely, Buang Ann Tay (I believe to be the first postdoc in UPM), Hassan Amirhashchi and Saeid Molladavoudi (after they graduated). I have another two PhD students (Choong Pak Shen, Ahmad Hazazi) and one MSc student (Ahmad Aqwa) who are about to submit their theses, hopefully in time before my retirement. Some of my colleagues told me this is more than enough for a professorship application but unfortunately supervised postgraduate students are not the only conditions; there are many others (some, mind-boggling). At this stage, I no longer consider  professorship as a realistic option particularly at this very late stage of my career. I have both internal and external reasons why I'm no longer considering such application (to the disappointment of my family and some colleagues). Maybe I will tell some of these after I retire or maybe they will die with me in the grave.