Kenechukwu Nwagbo is an emerging education and international development expert from Nigeria, with over 5 years’ experience working in the research, practice and policy of international development. Her research at Cambridge will examine public-private partnerships for education in low-income settings. Before the PhD, Kenechukwu managed global partnerships for development between leading research institutions across the ‘Global South’ and prominent development institutions around the world, including the Executive Office of the UN Secretary General. Her work supporting think tanks and other research institutions across Africa, Asia and Latin America, has contributed to the development of policy briefs, reports and other knowledge products for the UN, USAID, UNDP and IDRC amongst others.

Kenechukwu’s commitment to development has been greatly shaped by her upbringing. Born overseas to Nigerian diplomats, she was introduced to the importance of national service from an early age. A peripatetic upbringing across Europe and Nigeria presented contrasting realities, and the pressing need to understand why the quality of life in terms of education, healthcare and other social amenities, was seemingly better abroad than at home. Consumed by questions relating to the historical, social and economic development of her country, she studied the BA in International and Comparative Politics at the American University of Nigeria, where she graduated at the top of her class, before working to provide education in conflict-affected regions of north-eastern Nigeria. She holds an MPhil in Education, Globalisation and International Development from the University of Cambridge where she studied as a Standard Bank Africa Chairman Scholar, and hopes to build upon her MPhil research by contributing a better understanding of ‘what works’ in providing equitable access to education for all – a key pathway to sustainable development. She is honoured to have been awarded the Cambridge Africa Scholarship, and is delighted to join this vibrant scholar community.

College: Queens’ College

Supervisor: Professor Pauline Rose

Yaw is a licensed Medical Doctor by profession and a serial entrepreneur. He studied his Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery (Mb ChB) degree at the University of Cape Coast, Ghana. After working as a medical doctor in Ghana for a while, he went on to pursue a degree in Bioengineering (Neurotechnology Stream) at Imperial College London. During this period, he built a Soft Robotic Peristaltic Device for his thesis. Other projects he worked on included leveraging Machine Learning to build a Neural Decoder for moving a hypothetical prosthetic limb of a monkey.

His PhD at the University of Cambridge is a niche intersection of Medicine and Surgery and Engineering. It will involve building an implantable device that will leverage engineering principles for the treatment of Spinal Cord Injuries.

Other than medicine, engineering and entrepreneurship, Yaw enjoys playing sports and writing music.

PhD Supervisor: Dr. Christopher Proctor

College: Lucy Cavendish College

Born and raised in Nigeria, Chisom obtained her undergraduate and Master’s degrees from the University of Cambridge in 2020. During an internship at Shell Nigeria in 2018, she was investigating the problem of leakages in the oil and gas industry and became interested in how engineering principles play into biological problem-solving. A concept known as Biomimicry. She suggested a technology based on blood platelets’ functioning that could save millions of pounds in costs to the company. This process of applying knowledge found in nature to propose engineering solutions particularly intrigued her.

This interest drove her to study how fruits withstand loads on impact in hopes of providing a model for better load mitigating structures during a research internship at Cambridge University the next year. During her Master’s project, she described the mechanical behaviour and structure of a typical horse chestnut fruit population by combining her prior knowledge of engineering principles with newly acquired biology knowledge and biomimetic design.

By far the greatest challenge she faced during her studies was completing the last three months of her project at home, where power outages are common, due to the pandemic. As she struggled, she became enlightened to the urgent need for sustainable development initiatives to tackle problems plagued by countries like her own. Despite these challenges, she achieved a 1^st class result. She then made it her goal to pursue a career in research and advance renewable energy technologies on the African continent. As a Cambridge-Africa scholar, she will be conducting research on the cyclic loading of onshore wind turbine foundations focusing on optimising their design to drive down costs and make their construction more sustainable thereby reducing the barrier to their adoption in African countries.

PhD supervisor: Dr Christelle Abadie

College: Newnham College