faculty spotlight
Nyblade leading AfricaArray initiative
February 2006
Dr. Andrew Nyblade, Tanzanian-born associate professor of geosciences, is leading an initiative with collaborators in South Africa designed to increase the number of highly trained scientists in Africa. The primary goal of the AfricaArray initiative is to promote coupled training and research programs for building and maintaining a scientific workforce for Africa’s natural resource sector.
"For the countries of Africa to develop and become financially solvent, they will need to develop the continent’s natural resources. But to exploit the natural resources, scientists must be able to work in the industries finding developing, and managing them," says, Nyblade. "And for that to happen, a good education system to train students in specialized fields such a geophysics must be in place," he says.
The name "AfricaArray" refers to an array of shared training programs, an array of shared scientific observatories, scientists across the continent working on an array of shared projects, and above all, a shared vision that Africa will retain capacity in an array of scientific fields vital to the development of its natural resource sector.
Geophysics education and research has been selected as the initial focus for AfricaArray. Geophysicists are in high demand in the strategically important fields of oil and gas exploration, mineral exploration, geothermal energy development, water resource development, and earthquake hazard mitigation (including mine tremors). A recent survey of select mining and oil companies indicates that as many as 20 new geophysics graduates are needed every year by industry in Africa; additional geophysics graduates are needed in government agencies, particularly to work in water resource development, and in academic institutions.
AfricaArray is an AESEDA (Alliance for Earth Sciences, Engineering and Development in Africa) project and fulfills part of the broader AESEDA mission to promote the development of geo-resources for sustainable livelihoods in Africa.
AfricaArray was established through a partnership of three founding organizations, The University of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg, South Africa), the Council for Geoscience (Pretoria, South Africa), and The Pennsylvania State University (University Park, PA, USA), but the partnership base has rapidly expanded to include many other organizations.
AfricaArray was officially launched in January 2005 and already has gained financial support from groups such as the National Science Foundation and South African Research Foundation.