Educational Program

Chijioke Kaduru of Corona Management Systems in Nigeria will strengthen malaria mathematical modeling capability and capacity in Nigeria by building a fellowship program for field epidemiologists and current doctorate students in epidemiology. The program will be embedded within the Nigeria Field Epidemiology Training Program (NFETP), which is managed and coordinated by the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control.

Yaw Asare Afrane of the University of Ghana will build malaria modeling capacity in West Africa by training a critical mass of modeling scientists across multiple career stages to work closely with national malaria control programs (NMCPs). They will strengthen infrastructure and faculty in existing laboratories, provide technical training and support, and promote modeling as a PhD program in universities. They will also develop mathematical modeling curricula in malaria and NTDs in multiple languages and adapted for each country, which will be freely available online.

Sheetal Silal of the University of Cape Town in South Africa will establish the Malaria Modeling and Analytics: Leaders in Africa (MMALA) program to promote the training and career development of a critical mass of African malaria modelers that can support decision making of national malaria control programs (NMCPs).

Wilfred Ndifon of the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences - Next Einstein Initiative Foundation in Rwanda together with Luc Djogbénou from the Université d'Abomey-Calavi, Benin, and Jeanine Condo from the University of Rwanda, will collaborate with academic institutions, operational partners and national malaria control programs (NMCPs) from Benin, Rwanda, Senegal, Burkina Faso, Mozambique, Côte d'Ivoire, Switzerland, Australia, Kenya and Ghana to create a sustainable ecosystem of mathematical modelers, translational specialists, and decision-makers to support malaria inte

Yogan Pillai of Clinton Health Access in South Africa will build on work done to address the gaps in knowledge that many pregnant women have in both understanding their pregnancy and the development of the fetus as well as how to navigate the health system.

Yaw Bediako, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Yemaachi Biotech and researcher at the West African Centre for Cell Biology and Infectious Pathogens in Ghana, will bring together African biotech and academia with the Francis Crick Institute to provide important insights into how vaccines can be designed to work more optimally among African people. The African continent has the highest infectious disease burden in the world but almost no capacity for vaccine development or testing.

Village Education Tutors Foundation in the U.S. will develop a culturally relevant and virtual one-on-one mathematics instruction and coaching program geared towards African American and Latina students educated in underserved communities by providing whole child learner models that foster academic and mental health wellness.

The University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) Curtis Center for Mathematics and Teaching in the U.S. will create a mentorship program to motivate students at the Barack Obama Global Preparation Academy (BOGPA) to improve their performance in mathematics by positioning students on small research teams investigating a mathematics problem arising in the environmental science of their community, human biology or aerospace engineering, with mentorship by UCLA and SpaceX BlackX mathematicians of color.

The Young People's Project (YPP) in the U.S. will develop a formal certification program and online learning platform to support high school students experiencing poverty to create and use interactive math games to more effectively teach algebra to their younger peers. YPP developed a program for teaching algebra whereby middle and high school students are employed as Math Literacy Workers to develop interactive games to improve their own math literacy, and to use them to improve the literacy of their peers.

Zearn, a nonprofit curriculum publisher and math platform, will develop an individually adaptive fluency product for middle school students that focuses on sharpening foundations from Grades 3–5, including fractions and operations, to promote a deeper understanding of complex concepts on the path to Algebra proficiency. The product will adapt a series of activities to individual students, particularly focused on supporting students who have been struggling in previous grades. The materials and activities will be developed together with students, especially priority students.