Overtoun Jenda
Tuskegee University, AL·Mathematics & Statistics
Mathematical research grows when people who ask different questions, and use different techniques, work on the same problems. This network's goal is to strengthen the community of mathematical scientists in both the United States and Sub-Saharan Africa: senior researchers, early-career faculty, postdoctoral researchers and students.
- Fields
Mathematics & Statistics
Education Research
- Topics
mathematical sciences
mathematics
international research collaboration
- Grants
- 1 known grant, last ended Sep 2026
What they work on
- Form joint US-African research teams of senior mathematicians, early-career faculty, postdocs and students within groups spanning pure, discrete and applied mathematics, so that each team combines both regions' questions and techniques.
- Bring network members together each year at the Masamu Advanced Study Institute (MASI), a 10-day institute held alongside the SAMSA international conference, to work on research problems in person, present findings and plan the next year's projects.
- Broaden the questions and methods applied to shared research areas by drawing on the different techniques African and US mathematicians use, with the aim of increasing research output for participating US researchers.
- Support US faculty, students and postdocs to attend MASI each year, with the goal of producing new PhDs, joint publications and lasting research partnerships between the US and Sub-Saharan Africa.
More about the research
It builds on the Masamu Program, which the Southern Africa Mathematical Sciences Association (SAMSA) started in 2010 to promote international research collaboration in mathematics and related areas.
Why it matters
The problems these teams study have stated uses in national security, network coverage, surveillance, transportation, finance and statistics. They also bear on how diseases spread and on biodiversity, which shape public policy, as COVID-19 showed. Work on models of tumor growth, cell motility and DNA structure may inform medicine. Over time, the network could also expand the number of trained mathematical scientists in the US and Sub-Saharan Africa.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Konstantina Trivisa
University of Maryland, MD·Mathematics & Statistics
Develop new quantum algorithms and strengthen existing ones using tools from algebra, representation theory and scientific computing, with implications for scientific computing performance.
Loren Hayes
University of Tennessee-Chattanooga, TN·Ecology & Evolution
Determine how environmentally mediated changes in social organization — group size and composition — influence reproductive success in the degu (Octodon degus), a social rodent endemic to Chile.
Thomas Kelly
Georgia Institute of Technology, GA·Mathematics & Statistics
Use randomness and the probabilistic method to prove new results on embedding structures such as Hamilton cycles in graphs and hypergraphs, networks where an edge can join several points.
The school
Tuskegee University: 4 labs on PI Pages, $30M a year on research, 6 research doctorates a year.
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