Last year, NOVA profiled mathematician and cosmologist Arlie Petters, who, like Neil Turok, is bringing high quality math and science education to those who previously had no such opportunities.

Originally from a rural town in Belize, Dr. Petters grew up to become a leading figure in the field of gravitational lensing, the study of how light is “bent” by space and time.  The first African-American tenured faculty member in the Mathematics and Science department at Duke University, his is not just a story of achievement in science but of dedication to his own dreams and to those of his country of birth.

Dr. Petters immigrated to the US while in high school.  It was at this time that he turned his interest in the stars into an academic passion.  Now he is woking to help others children in Belize much like himself do the same.  In 2005, Dr. Petters opened the Petters Research Institute to train Belizean children in math and science.  The institute fosters national development through entrepreneurship in these fields. His vision for the country is to create economic growth through high-technology industries that draw on Belizean intellectual capital.  He has also worked on the math and science curriculum for the whole country which has expanded his reach even beyond the Institute.

Nubiah Cheetah posted today about the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in South Africa.  With research areas including biosciences, laser technology, and space technology, the CSIR is committed to supporting innovation in South Africa to improve national competitiveness in the global economy.

Definitely worth checking out.

Recently I wrote about the benefit for scientists of sharing their scholarly work and the difficulties posed by the current system of scientific databases.  Today I learned about a new open source effort for scientists to share their work, WorldWideScience.org. (via Gray Area)

WorldWideScience is…’a global science gateway connecting you to national and international scientific databases. It hopes to ‘accelerate scientific discovery and progress by providing one-stop searching of global science sources’…

A blog on the OSTI site provides some background: ‘The dilemma is that no single scientist can be expected to be aware of the hundreds of high-quality STI sources on the web. Moreover, even if a person were aware of all of these sources, he or she simply wouldn’t have the time to search them one-by-one to find the scientific knowledge that will help accelerate his or her own efforts…’

The answer proved to be the creation of federated searching and precision relevance ranking technology to provide a single gateway to a number of national science databases.

The NextEinstein Initiative is currently recruiting a CEO.  Applications are due before September 31st.

Here is an overview of NEI and the CEO position requirements:

The Next Einstein Initiative (NEI) is building a network of postgraduate centres of excellence for teaching and research in the mathematical sciences, throughout Africa, building on the proven success of the prototype African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) in Cape Town, South Africa. The network of AIMS Centres will operate as a single, coherent, pan-African institution, performing the following tasks: recruiting outstanding African graduates and international lecturers; teaching broadly applicable problem-solving skills and fostering innovative thinking; enabling its graduates to pursue successful careers in education, science, technology, business and government, in Africa, and thereby building a pan-African high-skills community which can make a major contribution to Africa’s future economic and political self-sufficiency. By recruiting and developing scientific talent in Africa, NEI aims to discover people of rare creative genius, capable of revolutionary advances in various fields of human endeavour. By adding entrepreneurship and leadership skills to the curriculum, NEI aims to stimulate wealth creation. As well as the Next Einstein, we hope to discover the Next Gates, Brin and Page, in Africa.

NEI is now recruiting a Chief Executive Officer, to manage all aspects of the development and implementation of the NEI programme. The successful applicant will: be strongly committed to African development and the NEI goals; be a highly knowledgeable project manager preferably with an MBA and/or business building experience; possess significant experience in planning, developing and managing large partnership projects; be an outstanding project and staff manager with a track record of timely implementation; preferably have good academic/scientific knowledge; be fluent in English with a strong command of French; be an intelligent, well-organised, responsible and highly responsive individual with excellent interpersonal skills.

Download the job description for more details.

Collaboration is the name of the game at AIMS.  Students, tutors, lecturers, and staff live and learn together as family.  This communal spirit is part of the reason the program is so successful. But how do you extend this spirit beyond the walls of one school and create a collaborative environment around the continent?

The NextEinstein Initiative is answering this question by helping to roll out AIMS center across the continent.

The Pan Africa Chemistry Network is facilitating collaboration by building a network of scientists, researchers, schools and libraries to promote science and research throughout Africa. (via SATS Ltd blog)

The first hub, based at the University of Nairobi in Kenya, has been funded with the assistance of a ₤1million grant from agribusiness Syngenta. Royal Society of chemistry is supporting and promoting the creation of a knowledge–sharing network for African chemical scientists. As Alejandra Palermo, the RSC special projects manager said “The network is organised on a hub and spoke model to reflect local needs. Scientists will meet through a programme of seminars, conferences and workshops. Fellowships and grants will be awarded to enable active participation in these events and to further enhance networking, technology transfer and skills development by facilitating international mobility of key scientists”.

More from the PACN site:

The Network aims to:

• Support the teaching of chemistry in schools via courses for teachers, provision of materials and resources which will be made available to schools.
• Support chemistry in Higher Education by running courses and providing training to allow scientists to make better use of resources such as the RSC archive; and provide some extra digitisation of other materials to African scientists.
• Promoting intra Africa scientific networking and conferencing on the key science issues facing the continent with a view to supporting the development of sustainable science programmes and expertise.
• Create centres of excellence for the chemical sciences to support economic & human development.

Transferring knowledge between professionals is often the source of innovation and expansions of ideas.  However, intellectual property laws, copyrights, and such present boundaries to this sharing and can hinder learning, exploration, and creativity.  Creative Commons has been an important breakthrough for many fields including art and video.  Science Commons is trying to be the equivalent for the scientific community.

Ethan Zuckerman of My Heart’s in Accra has a post today on the attempt to provide Open Access to scientific data with Science Commons and the research of his colleague, Melanie Dulong de Rosnay, on the licensing of scientific databases and the obstacles such licensing presents to collaboration between scientists around the world.

The reason this is important, Melanie explains, is that scientific research proceeds more quickly when researchers can share resources. But with databases encumbered by different, confusing legal protections, it can become a legal nightmare for researchers to do complex work building new tools that combine information from two databases in a novel way, for instance. And databases that are protected by access restrictions can be out of reach to scientists in developing nations who might not have the financial or technical resources to access them.

…a project like the database work Science Commons and Melanie are undertaking is basically one that seeks to make a cultural change, encouraging scientists to share data while retaining citation credit. In some scientific communities – particle physics, for instance – this is standard practice. In others – microbiology – it’s quite uncommon.

Be inspired by the stories of current and former AIMS students.  Every two weeks we upload three talks from the May 12 launch of the NextEinstein initiative.  This week we have two students, Daphne and Viani, as well as a musical performance by Vusi Mahlasela.

Check the rest out on the NextEinstein YouTube Channel.

The Royal Society and the Leverhulme Trust just announced a partnership to fund collaborations between scientists in Ghana, Tanzania and the UK. The “Leverhulme Royal Society Africa Awards” will provide up to £150,000 over three years for 18 research projects.   As described by Professor Lorna Casselton, Foreign Secretary of the Royal Society, “The scheme’s five research priority areas – agriculture, water, sanitation, basic human health research, and biodiversity and energy – have been selected by African colleagues as challenges where science can have the most impact on the lives of Africans.”

The awards will officially launch in October 2008.