Noi Campus hosts the Siriraj Hospital. The Phayathai Campus, which spans 32 hectares, has many faculties. The university also has an expansive campus in the suburban area – the 210-hectare Salaya campus which functions as a hub for university administration. The university is expanding its facilities for various academic faculties and research activities. It has provincial campuses in Kanchanaburi (950 hectares), Nakhon Sawan (270 hectares), and Amnat Charoen province (68 hectares). With its goal of being the “Wisdom of the Land”, Mahidol University has continuously strived for educational excellence, outstanding research, leadership in healthcare services, and global outlook. With traditional strength in medicine (two Faculties of Medicine and four University Hospitals) and sciences (most prominent science faculty in Thailand), Mahidol University has become an increasingly multi-disciplinary institution, including the social and cultural disciplines with emerging strengths in Music and endangered language researches. The university hosts 17 faculties, six colleges, seven research institutes and three centers. Annually, Mahidol University produces 1,000 medical doctors, serves 4.4 million out-patients and 0.12 million in-patients. It shares the top two Thai universities ranking with Chulalongkorn University. With its strong commitment to internationalization, Mahidol University actively collaborates with over 130 overseas academic insitutions, offers 148 international programmes for students from 50 countries, and produces over 1,500 professional papers annually. Autonomous transformation has enhanced Mahidol University’s efficiency, flexibility and ability to innovate and standardize its practices with those of other world-class universities. A programme at the university level to encourage partnership for biodiversity conservation between the university and local communities is still in its nascent stage. University-supported research on biodiversity based on faculty members’ interests offer some guidelines for best practices. Results of these research projects can be used to scale up processes from one facet of biodiversity in one area to multiple facets in a number of areas, from research to education, and from biodiversity conservation to sustainable development. Mahidol University and Biodiversity Conservation Biodiversity is not only broad in concept, but also in operation. It is obvious that the link between biodiversity, medicine and science lies in the search for the medicinal and biotechnological values of biodiversity. Mahidol researchers have searched for these through disciplinary coordination among the fields of chemistry, botany, pharmacy and biotechnology. Biodiversity utilization is the mainstream biodiversity research pursued at Mahidol University. Other angles of biodiversity research like biodiversity conservation have been carried out by research minorities due to faculty members’ personal interests. This type of research has contributed significantly to biodiversity conservation, but only for a few species such as the Hornbill, elephant, Asian wild cattle, and gibbon researches. While the research conducted on biodiversity conservation by Mahidol researchers is limited in number, lessons learned from each case can contribute a great deal toward scaling up conservation efforts. In each case, the conservation operation can be seen as “surrogates” or “biodiversity representatives.” Species-based surrogates may include Umbrella Species (species conservation conferring some protective status to numerous co-occurring species), Focal Species (species to determine landscape characters for restoration purposes), Keystone Species (for conservation planning for ecosystem process of high ecological integrity), and Indicator Species (a cheaper index species for other species which are difficult or expensive to measure). One notable research supported by Mahidol University between 2009 and 2011 is a research project entitled Involving Local Communities in Conservation and Restoration of Threatened and Endangered Gibbons in Khao Soi Dao Wildlife Sanctuary, Chanthaburi Province and Lum Nam Pai Wildlife Sanctuary, Mae Hong Son, Province, Thailand. The research was conducted to: implement action research at a site-based level and to ENCOURAGING PARTNERSHIP BETWEEN BUSINESS AND COMMUNITIES FOR BIODIVERSITY 63
In Celebration of His Majesty the King of Thailand’s 84th Birthday Anniversary
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