The booming higher education sector in the oil-rich Middle East has just claimed one more American academic — Fawwaz Ulaby, a professor of engineering and former vice president for research at the University of Michigan — in its epic search for talent.

What’s more, as provost of the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Mr. Ulaby will be responsible for drawing about three hundred more academics to Saudi Arabia. His main task is to assemble the new university’s first faculty from the ground up, a job he will tackle while on a leave of absence from Michigan.

The $10-billion new institution, still under construction at a site overlooking the Red Sea about 50 miles north of Jeddah, is scheduled to open its doors in September of 2009.

Mr. Ulaby says the university, known as Kaust, aims to have 300 professors and 2,000 students within five years. But it will start out with about 100 faculty members and an enrollment from 500 to 600 — all graduate students.

“Kaust is a graduate-only university,” Mr. Ulaby explains. And none of those graduate students will pay tuition or need to earn their keep with assistantships, he says. Admission to the university comes with a full fellowship for either master’s or doctoral study — plus a fellowship that covers the student’s senior year of undergraduate work.

Those inducements, like the several-dozen handsomely financed research centers that Kaust is setting up at universities across the globe, are part of an effort to fashion one of the world’s major research institutions from scratch, says Mr. Ulaby.

“There are many fine universities in the region, but none of them, to be honest, are world-class research universities,” says Mr. Ulaby. “The intent is to make Kaust the first such university in the entire Middle East.”—John Gravois