Advancing science in the developing world

TWAS president launches celebrations for the Academy’s 40th Anniversary 

For 40 years, TWAS has been a leading force in developing crucial scientific capability in some of the most underdeveloped countries in the world. To launch the 40th Anniversary of the Academy, TWAS President Quarraisha Abdool Karim visited the organization’s headquarters in Trieste, Italy. On 25 May, she met representatives of other Trieste-based scientific organizations and delivered a public lecture on the African legacy of academic excellence, in generating new knowledge for better health.

Abdool Karim is an eminent South African epidemiologist, a 2015 TWAS Fellow, and the winner of the Academy’s prestigious TWAS-Lenovo Science Award in 2014. She is also the co-founder and associate scientific director of the Centre for the AIDS Programme of Research in South Africa (CAPRISA) in Durban, South Africa. She is currently serving her first of four years as the president of TWAS. Abdool Karim is the first woman to serve in the role of TWAS President, and leads a 16-member council comprised of eight men and eight women.

While visiting, Abdool Karim met with TWAS secretariat staff as well as the Academy’s sister organizations, the InterAcademy Partnership and the Organization for Women in Science for the Developing World, and its host institution, the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics. The visit culminated in the TWAS 40th Anniversary Launch event at the Savoia Excelsior Palace Hotel in Trieste, and a public lecture from Abdool Karim on public health, academic excellence, and Africa’s past and future.

The capacity we need for the future we want

Today, great success stems from the work of international teams. Academia, industries and governments should all work to bring down barriers preventing collaboration, allowing developing world scientists to play a key role in ensuring a better future to everyone.

This was a key message of the four panellists who shared their views during the TWAS round table at the 12th edition of Trieste Next science festival. These panellists were brought by TWAS to Trieste for the annual TWAS Council Meeting. At Trieste Next, they engaged with the public on some of the most pressing global issues that scientists are addressing today.

Trieste Next is an international science festival hosted in Trieste since 2012. The event attracted more than thousands of visitors from the region Friuli Venezia Giulia and Italy's neighbouring countries, and beyond. This year, the festival ran from 22–24 September, with a broad agenda of more than 300 speakers and over 100 events, in both Italian and English. TWAS has been a participant since the festival's first edition, in 2012.

Science for a better world

Science is the product of humanity’s most brilliant collective imagination, said TWAS President Quarraisha Abdool Karim at her recent talk at Trieste Next in Trieste, Italy. And, she added, this is the source of inspiration for many of today’s scientists worldwide.

“Today as scientists, we actually are riding on the shoulders of giants—scientists who have come before us who think about what the world will need,” said Abdool Karim. “They were able to not just imagine, but take those ideas and translate them into something tangible.”

The event was attended by 17 students from Deledda-Fabiani High School and 19 from Addobbati-Brunner Junior High School, both in Trieste. They were part of an audience of over 60.

Science diplomacy returns to Trieste

Twenty-six science diplomats, half with a scientific background, half with a focus in policy or diplomacy, recently took part in the tenth annual AAAS-TWAS Course on Science Diplomacy. There, they received a deep education on how science and diplomacy intertwine to ease tensions and create international bonds that can last generations.

The course took place 19–23 June 2023. Attendees were grouped into ‘participant pairs’—one early-career scientist and one policymaker each from the same country—that attended presentations and discussions on issues in science diplomacy. The pairs were also challenged to play out roles in simulated negotiations on difficult topics with competing interests such as the construction of a dam on a shared river and the conservation of endangered species in a transboundary forest.

The course is a collaboration between TWAS and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and receives primary financial support from Sida, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, and AAAS. The Organization for Women in Science for the Developing World and InterAcademy Partnership also contributed funding.

The impact of science diplomacy training

Elizabeth Njenga recalls the science diplomacy courses she attended as not only informative, but a creative experience. A botanist from Kenya, she said that the courses’ simulations illustrated how science and international relations intertwine, and why thoughtful scientific advice is indispensable for good diplomacy.

“I would say that the second training, which was hands-on, enchanced my skills, thus enabling me to conduct and facilitate trainings in science diplomacy,” she said. “This training in Trieste was not just academic, but rather an application of science diplomacy for addressing global challenges.”

Njenga is just one of over 300 alumni of the AAAS-TWAS Science Diplomacy Course. Since 2014, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and TWAS have held nine courses, most of them held in-person in Trieste, Italy, and the programme has become a major fulcrum for science diplomacy education, especially for scientists from developing countries. Course alumni are now influencing policy and spreading knowledge about the fast-growing science diplomacy field throughout the developing world. 

Essay: Nurturing peace through science diplomacy

TWAS offers a framework for forming a taskforce among its Arab members for a common strategy in an increasingly prominent area of expertise: science diplomacy. 

In an essay, TWAS Fellow Mustapha Benmouna lays out the case for greater involvement among the Arab scientific community in this important field. 

He also lays out the basic concepts underpinning science diplomacy, puts forward some ideas for a possible debate on this major question, and urges Arab scientists to join in science diplomacy efforts.

TWAS graduates its 1,000th PhD

TWAS PhD fellowships have been building scientific strength in the developing world by training new scientists since 2004. And now, the programme has reached a remarkable milestone, graduating over 1,000 PhDs.

The 1,000th PhD graduate is Aakash Kumar, who left his home country of Pakistan in 2017 to pursue doctoral studies at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei, China. “I wanted to do bigger things in my life, so I decided to apply for a scholarship,” he said.

When Kumar began his PhD programme, he was primarily focused on electronic communications technology, and wasn’t certain how he wanted his career to develop. His supervisor, automation science expert Yin Baoqun, convinced him to enter artificial intelligence (AI) research. It was very new for Kumar at the time, but as he pursued cutting-edge research skills at the university, he found himself developing a crucial talent for understanding and working with AI.

How to empower forestland peoples

Forestlands threatened by development need conservation policies to survive. But for such policies to be “humane”, they must account for the livelihoods of those who live in those remote areas, according to Malagasy socio-economist Sarobidy Rakotonarivo, the winner of the 2022 TWAS-Samira Omar Innovation for Sustainability Award. TWAS honoured her work combining research with policy engagement in Africa, including remote areas of Madagascar, Gabon and Kenya.

Rakotonarivo is a TWAS Young Affiliate and a researcher at the University of Antananarivo in Madagascar. Her research focuses on remote forestland communities whose lives are deeply and directly affected by policies designed to protect natural lands, and her work helps rural people who might otherwise be ignored by such policies, advocates for their interests—and thus finds a proper balance between their well-being and the stability of nature.

The TWAS-Samira Omar Award is an annual honour sponsored by TWAS Fellow Samira Omar Asem of Kuwait, and carries a cash award of US$4,000. The prize honours scientists from Least Developed Countries who are working in a field tied to sustainability. Rakotonarivo is the sixth winner of the award, and past winners have been from Benin, Ethiopia, Sudan, Togo, and Uganda.

Advancing tuberculosis care in Bangladesh

Despite a reduction in the number of people with tuberculosis (TB) registered between 2019 and 2020, Bangladesh is still a country where the disease is a major burden, accounting for 3.6% of the global total, according to the 2022 World Health Organization Global Tuberculosis Report.

Sayera Banu is a senior scientist and heads the Programme for Emerging Infections at the Infectious Diseases Division at icddr,b in Dhaka, Bangladesh—and she has been carrying out extensive studies on TB since 2001, with strong results. In fact, she innovated new techniques to isolate the TB-causing organism (Mycobacterium tuberculosis) and to contain antimicrobial resistance, which is currently a public health issue worldwide.

For her ground-breaking research on TB and its effective translation into policy and practice, TWAS bestowed on her the 2022 TWAS-Fayzah M. Al-Kharafi Award. 

The maths behind the models

Khalil Ezzinbi, a Moroccan mathematician who specializes in work important to reducing the complexity of systems analyzed by computer models, is the winner of the 2022 TWAS-Mohammad A. Hamdan Award.  

Ezzinbi is based at Cadi Ayyad University, Marrakech, Morocco. He was honoured for his contributions to the development of new methods for solving complex equations useful for systems modeling.

The award, named for the late TWAS Vice-President of the Arab Region, is given every two years. It recognizes outstanding mathematical work by a scientist living and working in Africa or the Arab Region, and comes with a US$5,000 prize.

HIV: the burden of disease

Despite progress in research and therapy, infections caused by HIV are still a global public health issue. At the end of 2021, an estimated 38.4 million people were living with HIV; roughly two thirds of them are in the WHO African Region. And about 1.4 million of them live in Uganda.

Damalie Nakanjako is a Ugandan physician with 22 years of experience in infectious diseases care and Principal of the College of Health Sciences, at Makerere University, in Kampala, Uganda. She devoted her career to fighting HIV and other major diseases, such as tuberculosis. Her research is now paving the way for reducing the HIV burden in Uganda.

In 2022, she received the TWAS-Abdool Karim Award, which honours women scientists in low-income African countries for their achievements in biological sciences. Nakanjako conducts clinical research on the mechanisms of immune activation, inflammation, and recovery of immunity during chronic HIV infection. This work is improving how much access people have to HIV diagnoses, and help managing tuberculosis-HIV co-infections.

Protecting soil and water from contamination through biochar

Sri Lanka has some difficult environmental problems that are common throughout the world, including wide-spread dumping sites, and pollution that contaminates agricultural soil and well water. But Anushka Rajapaksha, winner of the 2022 TWAS-Atta-ur-Rahman Award in Chemistry, is employing and improving upon one possible solution: a chemical-capturing substance called biochar.

The annual award is sponsored by Pakistani TWAS Fellow Atta-ur-Rahman, a leading scholar in the field of organic chemistry and a globally influential advocate of science education. The award, which includes a US$5,000 prize, is given to a young chemist in a scientifically lagging country and aims to inspire young researchers in these nations to pursue chemistry careers.

“Winning this award is really an encouragement as an early-career researcher, and it provides international recognition for my contribution in the field of chemistry,” said Rajapaksha, who was also a recipient of a Sida-sponsored 2020 TWAS Research Grant. “Hardships offer unexpected gifts if you believe in yourself to embrace the silver linings. I’m really happy and it’s a great honor.”

Shielding plants from stress

Deforestation, livestock grazing, and urban development are major threats to native plant life in Syria. On top of that, other hazards like water pollution and climate change-driven drought deeply constrain future agricultural and economic development.

For her outstanding research in response to these challenges, Syrian biotechnologist Nadia Haider won the 2022 TWAS-Fayzah M. Al-Kharafi Award. She shared the prize with Sayera Banu, the head of the Programme for Emerging Infections at the Infectious Diseases Division at the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research (icddr,b) in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

Haider is a research director with the Department of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology of the Atomic Energy Commission of Syria (AECS) in Damascus, Syria. She identifies genetic variations in crops and wild plants for facilitating, accelerating and optimising conservation and crop improvement programmes that produce species tolerant to various stressors, including high salt content in the water they need to thrive.

South-North exchanges shape scientific careers in the global South

Exchange visits are crucial for early-career researchers. This is the take-home message of four scientists from Least Developed Countries (LDCs) who presented their experience as fellows of a recently enacted exchange programme in Trieste, Italy.

Ousman Bajinka of The Gambia, Lykeang Muk of Cambodia, Gaelle Ndayizeye of Burundi and Edrees Khan Rahmatzada of Afghanistan spent about six months in Trieste as part of PACTs (ProgrAmme of CollaboraTions with LDCs). Here, they carried out research projects at the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (ICGEB).

"The developing world needs science. And Trieste—with its international centres such as TWAS, ICGEB, and others—offers the perfect place to learn new skills and position early-career scientists to serve the global South," said TWAS Executive Director Romain Murenzi.

Action is key to progress on gender equity, climate crisis

Leaders of teams that won first-of-their-kind TWAS-Elsevier Foundation Project Grants for Gender Equity and Climate Action assembled in Trieste, Italy, for a unique workshop. The goal was to train the leaders, all of them women, on how to ensure that their work leads to tangible, real-world outcomes.

The event, held 18–19 April 2023, included breakout groups focused on project management, communication of impact, and teamwork. The two days of activities also included high-level speakers who explained how to achieve a key sustainable development agenda item: climate action. Among them was Lučka Kajfež Bogataj of the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, who shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize as part of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Kajfež Bogataj gave an in-depth lecture on the current state of humanity’s response to climate change. "We can see the world is not on the right track,” she warned. “And despite the rhetoric, emissions are rising."

TWAS at LDC5: partnerships and education in the spotlight

As a leader in developing world science that offers support for research capacity to the Least Developed Countries, TWAS participated in high-level international discussions at The Fifth United Nations Conference on the Least Developed Countries (LDC5). 

LDC5 was a key opportunity for decision-makers and leading experts to shape a better future for the world’s most vulnerable nations through global partnerships. At the event, TWAS contributed expert panellists for high-level discussions, as well as an exhibition booth at the conference centre. The event took place in Doha, Qatar, from 5 to 9 March 2023.

On 7 March, TWAS Executive Director Romain Murenzi participated in a side-event called ‘Delivering on the Doha Programme of Action: Innovative partnerships for technology transfer and STI capacity development’. The event, organised by the United Nations Technology Bank for the Least Developed Countries (UNTB), emphasised the importance of partnerships promoting sustainable development in LDCs.

TWAS Fellows named to high-level UN Advisory Board

Two TWAS Fellows will serve on a new Scientific Advisory Board to advise UN leaders on breakthroughs in science and technology, according to an announcement from United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres.

Sandra Díaz is an ecologist at Córdoba National University in Argentina, and a senior principal investigator for the National Scientific and Technical Research Council of Argentina. Her research interest is plant functional traits and syndromes, their effects on ecosystem properties, and their interactions with global change drivers. She is a 2010 TWAS Fellow, and a current member of the TWAS Council, representing the Latin America and the Caribbean region from 2013 to 2016. She will serve on the UN board as an external member.

Tshilidzi Marwala is an under-secretary-general of the UN and the rector of the United Nations University (UNU). He is also an artificial intelligence engineer, and previously held several high-level positions at the University of Johannesburg, including vice-chancellor; deputy vice-chancellor for research, postgraduate studies and the library; and dean of engineering and the built environment. He is a 2010 TWAS Fellow, and will serve on the board through his role as UNU rector.

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