{"id":103213,"date":"2020-03-03T17:02:58","date_gmt":"2020-03-04T01:02:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/03\/the-man-making-rwanda-into-a-hub-for-physics"},"modified":"2020-03-03T17:02:58","modified_gmt":"2020-03-04T01:02:58","slug":"the-man-making-rwanda-into-a-hub-for-physics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/03\/the-man-making-rwanda-into-a-hub-for-physics","title":{"rendered":"The Man Making Rwanda Into a Hub for Physics"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/the-man-making-rwanda-into-a-hub-for-physics2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/eaifr.org\/about\/director\/\">Omololu Akin-Ojo<\/a> was always reluctant to go to the United States. \u201cI felt I could do a lot of things in Africa,\u201d he told me in his office at the new <a href=\"http:\/\/eaifr.ictp.it\/\">East African Institute for Fundamental Research<\/a> (EAIFR) in Kigali, Rwanda. \u201cUnfortunately, I was wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>As a university student in his home country of Nigeria in the late 1990s, Akin-Ojo learned to write computer code by hand, without ever having the chance to put the code into a computer. Aware of these limitations, his father, a physicist, encouraged him to apply to doctoral programs abroad. While studying condensed matter physics at the University of Delaware, Akin-Ojo recognized the gulf in teaching and in research opportunities between Nigeria and the U.S.<\/p>\n<p>He realized then that he wanted to stem the brain drain of Africa\u2019s brightest minds. Although he spent the next 14 years working in the U.S. and Europe, he said, \u201cI always knew I was coming back to Africa.\u201d He chose to specialize in theoretical physics, so that the lack of experimental equipment in Nigeria wouldn\u2019t hinder his research when he returned.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Omololu Akin-Ojo was always reluctant to go to the United States. \u201cI felt I could do a lot of things in Africa,\u201d he told me in his office at the new East African Institute for Fundamental Research (EAIFR) in Kigali, Rwanda. \u201cUnfortunately, I was wrong.\u201d As a university student in his home country of Nigeria [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":542,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1523,32,219],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-103213","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-education","category-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103213","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/542"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=103213"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103213\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=103213"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=103213"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=103213"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}