Michael Olabisi, assistant professor in the Department of Agricultural Food and Resource Economics, was awarded a fellowship by the Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship Program, or CADFP, to travel to Nigeria to work with the University of Ibadan, or UI, and Oluwafunmiso Olajide on research collaboration and capacity-building.
Olabisi will conduct a workshop on empirical methods using the R programming tool for West African researchers and graduate students during his visit. The goal for the workshop is to enhance the statistical analysis toolkits of researchers, advanced graduate students and junior faculty in collaboration with Olajide of UI. The workshop will be held at the world-class facilities of the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture in Ibadan, Nigeria, or IITA. The collaboration with IITA and UI is expected to create new research opportunities for MSU and scholars in West Africa.
The project is part of a broader initiative that will pair 55 CADFP scholars with higher education institutions and collaborators in Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda to work together on curriculum co-development, research, graduate teaching, training and mentoring activities in the coming months.
The visiting fellows will work with their hosts on a wide range of projects that include controlling malaria, strengthening peace and conflict studies, developing a new master’s degree in emergency medicine, training and mentoring graduate students in criminal justice, archiving African indigenous knowledge, creating low-cost water treatment technologies, building capacity in microbiology and pathogen genomics and developing a forensic accounting curriculum.
To deepen the ties among the faculty members and between their home and host institutions, the program is providing support to several program alumni to enable them to build on successful collaborative projects they conducted in previous years.
The CADFP, now in its fifth year, is designed to increase Africa’s brain circulation, build capacity at the host institutions and develop long-term, mutually-beneficial collaborations between universities in Africa and the United States and Canada. It is funded by Carnegie Corp. of New York and managed by the Institute of International Education in collaboration with United States International University-Africa in Nairobi, Kenya, which coordinates the activities of the Advisory Council. A total of 335 African Diaspora Fellowships have now been awarded for scholars to travel to Africa since the program’s inception in 2013.
Fellowships match host universities with African-born scholars, individually or in small groups, and cover the expenses for project visits of between 21 and 90 days, including transportation, a daily stipend and the cost of obtaining visas and health insurance.
For more information to see a full list of 2018 projects, hosts and scholars, click here.
Direct all questions for the application process to here.
