Raising the scientific level and networking in Africa

“I have never seen so much enthusiasm,” says Sinead Griffin, referring to the African School on Electronic Structure Methods and Applications (ASESMA), where she participated as a mentor. “There were hands flying up all the time to get help. No one wanted to leave the computer room in the evenings.” Some 40 students and early-career lecturers from eight African countries attended the two-week boot camp last July near Cape Town, South Africa. One of them was Naphtaly Moro of Kenya, who says ASESMA was “an eye-opener to me, for it exposed me to research and experts. The experience is unforgettable to say the least.”

The biennial school, which launched last year, and its host, the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS), are different approaches with a common goal: Both are part of a small but growing trend to increase the number of educated people in Africa and the level of their education and to create tighter ties among researchers across the continent. Outside of astronomy, ASESMA and AIMS, which offers a program equivalent to the first year of a master’s degree, are perhaps the most visible such efforts.

Making science work

Obtaining funding for and maintaining lab equipment are huge challenges in Africa, says ASESMA co-organizer Nithaya Chetty, a physicist at South Africa’s University of Pretoria. “So computation is a relatively easy way to make science work here.” Electronic structure methods can be applied to many problems relevant to Africa, such as predicting new materials and improving fracture toughness, wear resistance, and other material properties, he adds, and the know-how can be transferred to other disciplines.

“What we are trying to achieve has potential impact on many facets of science and the economy—minerals, materials, computational sciences, energy,” says Chetty. After holding a similar school two years earlier, Chetty and others argued that a sustained effort was key to having lasting impact and they arranged to hold ASESMA sessions every two years through 2020. The schools are sponsored by two commissions of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics and receive financial support from an array of international bodies.

The organizers also introduced a year-round mentoring program. Six mentors—four from the US and two from Africa—attended ASESMA and remain available to the students, interacting mostly via e-mail and Facebook. Griffin, a graduate student in materials science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, says she spends four or five hours a week helping ASESMA students. “Most of the questions are about running [computer programs], but they feed into conceptual questions about the physical systems.” About half of the ASESMA 2010 participants continue to work together on a project they started at the school: calculating the transition pressures at which quartz and other materials change structure. What makes ASESMA special, says Chetty, “is mentoring, continuity, and bringing quality scientists to Africa.”

In the past, Chetty says, the primary mode of scientific engagement between Africa and the West was to send African students and scholars abroad. “I don’t want to underplay that,” he says, “but with Western scientists now traveling to African destinations, the impact is on a larger body of African scientists. It has a greater ripple effect.”

Common languages

Neil Turok, AIMS founder and head of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, says of ASESMA 2010, “It was a great school. The topic was chosen well. They basically showed people in Africa how to use the latest software for calculating band structure in materials. People can take that stuff home with them and use it for their research.” But, he adds, “what Africa really needs are solid institutions. Real growth of a strong physics community requires strengthening institutions and creating new ones. Summer schools are no substitute.”

The AIMS center in South Africa was founded in 2003 (see PHYSICS TODAY, May 2008, page 25 ). “We have 50 to 55 students a year from around 20 countries. We feed our graduates to master’s and PhD programs across Africa,” says Turok. A second AIMS center opened in Nigeria in 2008, and in July 2010 Turok secured Can$20 million ($19.6 million) from the Canadian government to found three new centers—in Senegal, Ghana, and Ethiopia. His goal is to grow to 15 centers. At that point, he says, “we will graduate 750 students a year, and this will completely transform the development of scientific talent in Africa.”

Efforts to unify Africa go beyond science, of course. But, says Turok, in overcoming the legacy of colonialism, “math and science are the common languages that overcome religious, cultural, and gender barriers. The biggest single success of AIMS is showing that multicultural diversity is in fact a stimulus and a source of inspiration.”

Among other efforts to strengthen intra-Africa scientific cooperation is the formation of the African Physical Society (see PHYSICS TODAY, March 2010, page 25 ). And if South Africa lands the Square Kilometer Array radio telescope—a final decision between it and Australia is expected in 2012—radio receiving dishes would be installed in Mozambique, Botswana, and other countries. The array, says Chetty, “holds a lot of promise for intra-African collaboration.” And science spending is going up. In South Africa, for example, it is now 0.8% of the gross national product, up from 0.65% a few years ago. Still, he says, “there is not an awful lot occurring on a continental scale. And it’s often ad hoc in nature. I hope that establishing a few success stories with outside help will generate momentum for further developments in science in Africa.”