LAERO welcomes Vincent Aduramigba-Modupe and Rachel Otieno
“School’s back” in Toulouse, and the beginning of the academic year also sees the arrival two new visitors to LAERO: Vincent Aduramigba-Modupe from the Institut of Agricultural Research and Training (IAR&T) in Nigeria, and Rachel Otieno from the Kenyan Water Resources Authority in Kenya.
Vincent Aduramigba-Modupe is a Senior Research Fellow and developmental soil scientist at the Institute of Agricultural Research and Training (IAR&T), Obafemi Awolowo University, Nigeria. He has over 20 years of experience in the field of site-specific nutrient management, budgeting and use efficiency, digital soil mapping and systems agronomy. He has led several donor funded collaborative projects in West Africa on soil nutrient management and climate change, and is currently the coordinator of an OCP Africa funded project focused on soil mapping and the development of specialty fertilizers for oil palm, tomato and wheat in Nigeria. He is the Africa Centre Director of the International Nitrogen Initiative, and President-Elect of the African Association of Precision Agriculture (AAPA).
Vincent brings valuable information to the INSA project on agricultural practices at both local and regional scales in West Africa. Thanks to his active involvement in both regional and international programs, he will also help identify and consolidate links between INSA and key stakeholders in Africa. This will in turn facilitate the flow of information between researchers and practitioners, a key objective for the INSA project.
Rachel Otieno is an experienced laboratory technologist at the Department of water quality and pollution control at the Water Resources Authority, under the Ministry of Water, Sanitation and Irrigation (MWSI), Kenya. Rachel has more than ten years professional experience, including participating as a researcher on the Nairobi City Water Distribution Master Plan project, funded by the French Development Agency and undertaken by Seureca Veolia consultants and East Africa Engineering Consultants in 2016.
This is a return visit for Rachel, whose initial secondment in March 2020 was cut short due to the covid-19 outbreak. She will spend two months in Toulouse working closely with Eric Gardrat and Maria Dias-Alves in our chemistry lab at LAERO (Toulouse III – Paul Sabatier University), using ionic chromatography to analyse aerosol samples from Cameroun. The secondment will allow Rachel to gain practical experience using new technologies and techniques that she can subsequently apply in Kenya. In return, Rachel’s extensive on-the-ground experience provides useful insights for identifying knowledge gaps, future research collaborations and informing policy recommendations.
