YAS-NA 2020

Clare Muhoro

Clare N. Muhoro is Professor of Chemistry at Towson University and Director of Competitive Fellowships and Awards in the Office of the Provost.

Her research focuses on the role of transition metals in organic transformations in two broad areas: synthesis of organic molecules via homogeneous metal-based catalytic hydroboration reactions; and degradation of organic pesticides in tropical aqueous environments in Ecuador, Mexico and Kenya.

C. Muhoro served as senior science and technology advisor at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in Washington DC (2013-2019) where she led on efforts to source, generate and apply innovative approaches that use science, technology and partnerships to address development challenges.  In addition C. Muhoro, a strong advocate for women in science, is Chairperson of the Board and founding member of the Mentoring Network of African Women in Academia (MTAWA) and is a board member of the Committee for the Advancement of Women in Science (COACh).

C. Muhoro received her B.Sc. in Chemistry from St. Lawrence University, NY, and her Ph.D. in Organometallic Chemistry from Yale University.

Ketevi Assamagan

Kétévi Adiklè Assamagan is a tenured physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL). He was born in Gabon. He went to primary school in the “Prefecture des Lacs” in Togo. In high school, he opted to major in physics and mathematics. After the BSc from the University of Lomé, he accepted a teaching job at a private high school.

During that period, he won a scholarship—sponsored and managed by the Africa-America Institute—to continue higher education in the US, and in 1987 he went to the Southern Illinois University in Carbondale to improve his English proficiency before he started the MSc program at Ball State University in Muncie Indiana. After the MSc, he was accepted into a PhD program at the University of Virginia. During the doctorate program, he went to the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland where he collected the data for his thesis results. He returned to the University of Virginia and obtained the doctorate degree in 1995.

He then accepted a post-doc offer from Hampton University to work at Jefferson Lab where he participated in the commissioning of CEBAF­—Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility. He then went to CERN—European Organization for Nuclear Research—in Geneva Switzerland as a research scientist to work on the ATLAS Experiment.

In 2001, he re-entered the US with a job at BNL as an assistant physicist. At BNL, he continued working on the ATLAS Experiment where he held several positions. He was the coordinator of the physics analysis tools, then the coordinator of the Muon Spectrometer software. Later on, he became the ATLAS Higgs Working Group convener, and was a member of the ATLAS Collaboration that discovered in 2012 the particle known as the Higgs boson.

He was visiting scientist at Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives at Saclay, in France in 2011, and at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa in 2012. He was naturalized a US citizen in 2006.

He is currently a visiting scientist at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.

He is a co-founder the African School of Fundamental Physics and Applications.

His current research interests focus on the searches for new physics beyond the Standard Model of particle physics such as the searches for new particles or for the nature of dark matter. In this context, he organizes a professional physics workshop on “Dark interactions: perspective from theory and experiments”.

He is a member of the National Society of Black Physicists, the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the South African Institute of Physics.

He is married and a father of one child. He plays African drums, especially the Djembe. He is also a writer. He published his first book in English, “Citizen and Traveler”, in 2017.