Last May, the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Rabigh City, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia awarded Cornell a grant to fund the KAUST-Cornell Center for Energy and Sustainability. Through the grant, Cornell receives $5 million dollars every year for five years from KAUST for sustainability research.
According to Prof. Lynden Archer, chemical and biomolecular engineering and a co-Principal Investigator of the of the center, KAUST is a university that the Saudi Arabian King Abdullah commissioned and is now in its early stages of construction. The university felt that it was important to develop research partnerships with leading schools around the world, using the Singapore-MIT alliance as a model.