Muhammad Rijal, a man who was born in Bagan Siapi-api City, has successfully defended his dissertation paper entitled Transfigurative as a Form of Coastal Settlement Space Configuration on Penyengat Island, through a closed doctoral promotion session chaired by Dr. Ir. Atiek Suprapti, MT, on 17 June 2020 with Cumlaude grades. Although at that time Semarang City was in a COVID-19 pandemic situation, the closed doctoral promotion session was still carried out online and passed as the 50th doctorate in the Architecture and Urban Science Doctoral Programme, Department of Architecture, Faculty of Engineering, Diponegoro University (UNDIP). The dissertation manuscript has been tested by Prof. Dr. Ir. Edi Purwanto, MT, and Prof. Dr. Nurdien H. Kistanto, MA, as UNDIP’s internal examination team in a series of dissertation hearings starting from the proposal hearing, feasibility hearing, to the closed doctoral promotion hearing. In addition, Prof. Ir. Happy Ratna S., M.Sc., Ph.D., was also involved in testing his dissertation manuscript as an external examiner from the Sepuluh November Institute of Technology (ITS) Surabaya. His dissertation manuscript is the result of a series of research processes directly guided by Prof. Dr. Ir. Bambang Setioko, M.Eng., as promoter and Dr. Ir. Agung Budi Sardjono, MT., as copromoter, both at the research site and in the studio at the UNDIP Architecture and Urban Science Doctoral Programme.
For 3 years and 10 months, the man who was born on 27 April 1975 has completed his lecture and research process in the urban architecture subfield of housing and settlement science related to coastal settlements, with Tanjung Pinang City as the research locus in Riau Islands Province. Her research topic is the spatial configuration of coastal settlements in Penyengat Island. His research is based on the post-positivism paradigm in a qualitative approach with an inductive strategy. The results showed that the spatial configuration of coastal settlements in Penyengat Island is a spatial process that pivots on the level of belief, the level of society, the historical net, the cultural tank and the nature of the islands which leads to the concept of Gurindam’s transfigurative space so that it is configured in three layers of knowledge, namely: surface, intermediary and core layers of knowledge. The transfigurative configuration is the substantive theory found in relation to the research topic.
As a lecturer in the Department of Architecture at Riau University, Muhammad Rijal has been given the opportunity to continue his doctoral education at the UNDIP Architecture and Urban Science Doctoral Programme through the LPDP scholarship from the Ministry of Finance of the Republic of Indonesia in the 2016 Budi-DN Scholarship Programme. During his education, he also played an active role in national and international seminars and has published several scientific articles in national and international journals. One of them is an article entitled Discovering the Themes of Space in Penyengat Island which has been published by the Web of Science (WoS) indexed journal IJST. In addition, he also actively participates in academic training in order to improve his research skills, such as: EBSCO Discovery Services (IDS) Utilisation Training, Scientific Document Management Training Using MENDELEY, Plagiarism Prevention Training Using TURNITIN, and other training organised by the Diponegoro University Faculty of Engineering Library.
