Today@Sam Article

Adu-Prah Selected For Carnegie Fellowship

June 1, 2017
SHSU Media Contact: Julia May

Samuel_Adu-Prah200
Dr. Samuel Adu-Prah

Samuel Adu-Prah, assistant professor of geography at Sam Houston State University, has been awarded a fellowship by the Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship Program to travel to Ghana this summer to work with Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology and professor Prince Osei-Wusu Adjei on geospatial technology curriculum enhancement and training for social science research.

Adu-Prah has taught courses in geographic information science and environmental modeling at SHSU since 2013. He holds a Ph.D. in environmental resources and policy with concentration in geographic information science and environmental modeling from Southern Illinois University. He currently serves as associate editor of the International Journal of Geospatial Research and has been the principal investigator on a number of grant-funded projects on spatiotemporal analysis.

Adu-Prah will collaborate with the faculty at KNUST to improve the curriculum for teaching geospatial technology in the Department of Geography and Rural Development, organize and teach an eight-week summer course for graduate students and faculty in geospatial technology, and collaborate with respective faculty on applied geospatial technology research.

The proposed project will build on the existing collaboration between Adu-Prah and Osei-Wusu Adjei and will provide a continued and long term relationship between Sam Houston State University and Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology.

“It is envisioned that this will bridge the gap and deal with shortages of qualified teaching staff, Ph.D. supervision and mentoring of young scholars at KNUST,” Adu-Prah said.  “Young scientists and students from both KNUST and Sam Houston State will benefit from student and faculty exchange program.”

Not only will KNUST profit immediately from the summer geospatial technology workshop that will be offered, but the faculty at KNUST will also benefit from teaching materials and supervision on graduate research. In the long term, a shared database consisting of current research publications at SHSU will provide services for the students and faculty.

Adu-Prah, through collaboration with faculty, will have access to local data, and opportunities for future research. His access to preliminary data will also help with completing grant applications.

Through the partnership, KNUST students will be able to take geospatial technology online courses from Sam Houston State University.

The Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology project is one of 43 projects that will pair African Diaspora scholars with one of 35 higher education institutions and collaborators in Africa 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 research in banking and finance; developing curriculum in therapeutics and environmental toxicology; mentoring faculty in computer science; and teaching and mentoring graduate students in media and communications and in a new interdisciplinary public health program.

To strengthen 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 Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship Program, now in its fourth year, is designed to reverse Africa’s brain drain, 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 Corporation 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 282 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 14 and 90 days, including transportation, a daily stipend, and the cost of obtaining visas and health insurance.

A complete list of 2017 projects, hosts and scholars and their universities can be found on the Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship program website.

 

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