Building the SciBridge Between Africa and the U.S.

Speaker

Veronica Augustyn

Department of Materials Science and Engineering, North Carolina State University

About This Talk

One of the successes of the Joint Undertaking for an African Materials Institute (JUAMI) was the introduction of early-career U.S. and African scientists interested in the global issue of materials for sustainable energy. The SciBridge project was initiated in 2013 by two alums of the first JUAMI school on materials for renewable energy, held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in 2012. The project aims to promote education and research collaborations on materials for sustainable energy between U.S. and African university students. The organization is now led by students at North Carolina State University in the U.S. and Makerere University in Uganda. SciBridge is organized around the idea that hands-on experiment kits can be utilized as the foundation for science research and education collaborations. Each SciBridge experiment kit contains enough supplies for approximately forty students. Thus far, kits have been sent to ten partner universities in four different African countries, Uganda, Ethiopia, Tanzania, and Rwanda. Partner universities utilize experiment kits for classroom and workshop demonstrations, outreach programs with global businesses, senior design projects, and graduate research. In this presentation, Augustyn will discuss the history of the SciBridge project and the opportunities and challenges in developing grassroots, sustainable outreach projects with developing nations.

Biography

Veronica Augustyn is the Jake and Jennifer Hooks Distinguished Scholar in Materials Science and Engineering and Associate Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at North Carolina State University. Her research focuses on the electrochemistry of materials, and especially transition metal oxides, for energy and environmental applications. Recent topics include understanding interfacial phenomena, insertion mechanisms, and confinement effects. She is the founder and faculty advisor of an award-winning international project, SciBridge, a student-led group that develops renewable energy research and education collaborations between universities in Africa and the U.S. She supports the materials electrochemistry community as a Scientific Editor of the Journal of Materials Chemistry A, serves on the editorial advisory boards of several journals including ACS Energy Letters, ACS Electrochemistry, and Physical Review Materials, and is a Member-at-Large of the Electrochemical Society Battery Division.