Two German Research Chairs filled at AIMS Rwanda

One of the chairs being financed by Germany’s Federal Ministry of Education and Research will be held by the German optimisation expert Abebe Geletu. “Optimising systems will make a crucial contribution to modernising and technologising  Africa”, said Geletu, who completed his habilitation at the Institute for Automation and Systems Engineering at TU Ilmenau in 2018. He wants to focus his work at AIMS Rwanda primarily on the use of mathematics in the management of water resources and energy distribution and plans to work together with engineers. Geletu will collaborate with Technion Israel Institute of Technology, particularly in the area of water management.

Making African research visible at international level

Originally from Poland, Jan Hązła was appointed to the second chair at AIMS Rwanda. He will develop and expand the mathematics section of the Department of Theoretical Computer Science. Hązła is an expert in coding theory and probabilistics. “My priority is to make young African mathematicians specialising in discrete mathematics more visible internationally”, said Hązła, who did a stint teaching programming at AIMS Rwanda after completing his doctorate at ETH Zurich in 2016. One focus of his work in Kigali will be on collaboration with Goethe University Frankfurt in Germany. Most recently, he taught and conducted research as a postdoc at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland.

The German Research Chairs programme at AIMS Centres in Africa seeks to reach researchers from the mathematics field around the world who conduct research with practical relevance and have trained students and doctoral candidates. As a rule, each research chair receives up to €835,000 for an initial period of six years and is financed by Germany’s Federal Ministry of Education and Research.