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Adanyro Atilago is on a crusade to turn a devastating invader into an energy solution. His goal is to make fuel from the water hyacinths that are choking the lakes and rivers of his West African homeland.

“We want to go from waste to energy,” explained the PhD student from Benin who is spending a year conducting research in the lab of Environmental Science & Technology Professor Stephanie Lansing. “Many rivers and lakes are covered by water hyacinths. So, it’s very challenging for the people to access the water easily, for fishing and traveling by boat. Our objective is to help the people remove these water hyacinths and produce biogas stoves.”

Water hyacinth is an aggressive invader that not only hinders navigation, but shades out other plants and starves aquatic ecosystems of oxygen. West African communities affected by them can face increased rates of malaria, schistosomiasis, cholera and devastating food insecurity.

Atilago, who studies at the International Institute for Water and Environmental Engineering in Burkina-Faso, is eager to benefit from Lansing’s world-renowned expertise in bio-digestion and biogas production research.

“I came here to learn about biogas production,” Atilago said, “but I realized that there is also a lot of equipment here that I can use to understand better about the water hyacinths and how to optimize biogas production from them.”

Atilago’s story represents more than his own entrepreneurial efforts to solve an environmental problem. It exemplifies the growing wave of young African scientists traveling abroad for higher education. And AGNR’s specific areas of expertise, with our focus on real-world applications, offers an attractive draw that the college is actively working to advance.

“Demographics tell us that we should position ourselves as a place individuals from developing countries want to come to,” said Jimmy Smith, director of AGNR’s International Programs. “As the number of American students is dropping, students from the developing world are seeking out new opportunities abroad, and it is important that we continue to reach out to them and build new partnerships with universities in these regions.”

Since arriving at AGNR in 2023, Smith and his office have been working to facilitate educational and research projects through our partnership with Daystar University in Kenya, and to help AGNR become a partner institution with the Regional Scholarship and Innovation Fund (RSIF). Atilago is the first of what we hope will become many visiting RSIF scholars.

Run by the African-led Partnership for skills in Applied Sciences, Engineering, and Technology, RSIF sends African doctoral students to partner colleges throughout the world with the aim of training 10,000 professional scientists over the next 10 years and building a critical mass of highly skilled African professionals to address issues of climate, food security, health and energy.

There are good reasons for prioritizing such partnerships. For one, they represent a growing market. According to International Consultants for Education and Fairs (ICEF) the number of internationally mobile Sub-Saharan African students has grown by 21% over the past five years. A mobility rate of 4.8% compared to the world average of 2.7%.

Another good reason for welcoming these scholars is that the world is shrinking–economically and healthwise we are much more connected to people on the other side of the planet than ever before–and building STEM capacity is critical to global well-being and stability. Although the college-aged population of Sub-Saharan Africa is expected to double by 2050, only 9% of that age group is currently enrolled in higher education. If that condition holds, it will almost certainly limit economic growth and social development and could worsen security issues on the continent.

As Africa seeks to educate its youth abroad, the competition for these students is growing. France has always been the largest host to African scholars, and even though the U.S. has enrolled 20% more students from the region in the last five years, Canada and Morocco saw increases of 67% and 61% respectively. And African student enrollment rates in Turkey have grown by a whopping 187% over five years. U.S. colleges must make a concerted effort if they hope to tap this growing pool of students.

With the caliber of our experts and our focus on big issues such as modernizing sustainable agriculture and solving food insecurity, AGNR is competitively positioned in that market. And as a Land Grant college, our deep roots working in communities through Extension creates a synergy for young scientists who intend to apply what they learn in communities back in their home countries.

Dr. Lansing’s work in bio-digestion and biogas production for example, is a very topical field in places where both energy infrastructure and waste management are integral to a sustainable society. Both here in the U.S. and abroad, converting waste to energy can be used to solve two major concerns with an environmentally sustainable footprint.

That’s what drew Dr. Chibueze Achi to come to the U.S. in 2018. Now a Senior Lecturer at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria, Achi was a Fulbright scholar who did research in Lansing’s lab towards earning this Ph.D. As he was preparing for his doctoral studies on converting manure to energy, Achi realized he didn’t have the proper resources, and he began searching Google for a university that could provide what he needed.

“I was trying to improvise, to devise some sort of crude method of generating biogas,” he recalls, “when I saw Stephanie Lansing’s work in that area, I was excited, and I decided to make her my first choice for my Fulbright application.”

As with Atilago, Achi found more learning opportunities than he originally expected once he arrived at the University of Maryland.

“When I came, I was thinking only about the lab research, but I realized that I could actually learn from observing the culture of the classroom environment here,” Achi said. “I learned about the mode of teaching, and active learning where students are involved and engaged.”

Achi said he also learned more about writing grants and publishing in peer reviewed journals and developed a network of colleagues in the U.S. He has since brought those experiences back to his students and colleagues in Nigeria, which has one of the youngest populations in the world and is expected to become the third largest source of international higher education students this year.

And the learning goes both ways. Lansing noted that visiting researchers from other parts of the world contribute a perspective to her lab culture that connects her lab’s work to its global applications.

“It is important for our students designing bioenergy systems in the U.S. to better understand scale and use of waste in other societies, and to think about their research through a broader lens,” Lansing said. “Student research exchange is definitely a two-way interaction in that we learn from their perspective while teaching how to incorporate our technologies in an appropriate manner. I have learned much from these student exchanges beyond publications and network development by gaining input from diverse perspectives.”

by Kimbra Cutlip : Momentum Magazine Summer 2024

https://agnr.umd.edu/momentum-magazine/summer-2024/courting-new-wave/