Research projects at Sultan Qaboos University are broadly grouped under the following nine themes:
Fundamental research addresses the advance of knowledge in fundamental areas of science and humanities, including philosophy, linguistics, mathematics, statistics, econometrics, theoretical physics and geophysics, physical chemistry and mathematical biology/ecology. It is basically grounded on theoretical paradigms and fosters insight-inspired topics that do not have obvious or immediate application. Some of the sub-themes include fluid physics, high energy physics, mathematical analysis, discrete mathematical systems, differential equations and dynamical system, modeling, fractals, chaos and theory of computing.