Valley View University was selected by the Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship Program (CADFP) to host an African Diaspora Fellow from the United States of America (USA) to work with VVU Computer Science faculty on a collaborative project, with a focus on:

1.     Developing a curriculum for a doctoral (PhD) program in Computer Science (CS).

2.    Mentoring faculty members in the Computer Science and Information Technology Departments in teaching, research, thesis supervision, among others.

The overarching outcome of the project will include increased production of PhD holders in Computer Science at the national level. Other spinoff outcomes will include faculty training, expansion of faculty research capacity and collaborations, engagement of the doctoral students as teaching/research assistants and role modeling, and vibrancy and infusion of technology across curricula at VVU. When successfully implemented, the doctoral program in CS will position VVU as the leading producer of CS faculty to feed the numerous CS and IT Departments that are inadequately staffed in these critical computing fields.

The resident Fellow, Prof. Patrick Otoo Bobbie, obtained his BSc (Hons) degree in Computer Science, in 1980 from the former University of Science and Technology (UST), currently known as the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST). He completed the MS Mathematics/Statistics degree from Marquette University, Wisconsin, USA, in 1982, and the PhD in Computer Science in 1986 from former University of Southwestern Louisiana (USL), now known as the University of Louisiana (UL) at Lafayette, Louisiana, USA. He rose to the full professorial rank in 1995, and has taught at various universities in the United States for 31 years.

Prof. Bobbie, along with Mr. Dominic Damoah, the Dean of Science, is leading a curriculum development team in the Computer Science Department at Valley View University.  In the course of the 3-month period, Prof Bobbie will also serve as a mentor in research and teaching for faculty members in the Computer Science and Information Technology Departments. 

The Valley View University project is one of the 43 projects that pair up African Diaspora scholars with one of 35 higher education institutions and collaborators in Africa to work together on curriculum co-development, research, graduate teaching, training and mentoring activities in the coming months.  The visiting Fellows work with their hosts on a wide range of projects that include research in banking and finance; developing curriculum in therapeutics and environmental toxicology; mentoring faculty in computer science; and teaching and mentoring graduate students in media and communications and in a new interdisciplinary public health program .To deepen the ties among the faculty members and between their home and host institutions, the Program is providing support to several program alumni to enable them to build on successful collaborative projects they conducted in previous years.

The Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship Program, now in its fourth year, is designed to reverse Africa’s brain drain, build capacity at the host institutions, and develop long-term, mutually-beneficial collaborations between universities in Africa and the United States and Canada. It is funded by Carnegie Corporation of New York and managed by the Institute of International Education (IIE) in collaboration with United States International University-Africa (USIU-Africa) in Nairobi, Kenya, which coordinates the activities of the Advisory Council. A total of 282 African Diaspora Fellowships have now been awarded for scholars to travel to Africa since the program’s inception in 2013. 

Fellowships match host universities with African-born scholars (individually or in small groups) and cover the expenses for project visits of between 14 and 90 days, including transportation, a daily stipend, and the cost of obtaining visas and health insurance. A total of 282 Fellows have now been selected since the program’s inception in 2013.

The CS and IT departments also intend to maintain a long-term relationship with Prof. Bobbie and explore the possibilities of collaborating with Kennesaw State University (the fellow’s home institution in the USA). 

Contact:

Dr. Isaac B. Boateng , Dean of Advancement, Valley View University

Jeremy Coats, Program Officer, or Sharon Witherell, Institute of International Education

See full list of 2017 projects, hosts and scholars and their universities.