THE ROLE OF AWARD AND VISIBILITY IN MAKING A DIFFERENCE

It's indeed auspicious that I started my blog in February. In February, 2015, I was in San Jose,  California, USA,  receiving the OWSD/Elsevier Foundation Award for Early Career Women Scientists.
Altogether, there were five of us, as follows:

 

(Left to Right)

• Rabia Salihu Sa'id, PhD, Deputy Dean of Student Affairs, Bayero University, Kano
• Mojisola Usikalu, PhD, Senior Lecturer in Physics, Covenant University, Ota, Nigeria
• Nashwa Eassa, PhD, Assistant Professor of Physics, Al Neelain University, Khartoum
• Mojisola Oluwyemisi Adeniyi, PhD, Head of the Atmospheric Physics/Meteorological Research Group, Department of Physics, University of Ibadan
• Dang Thi Oanh, PhD, Head of the Division of Science, Thái Nguyên University of Information and Communications Technology

I was literally, thrown in to the international limelight. I had invitations for interviews, home and abroad. I was a keynote speaker at the annual event of the Visiola Foundation; a foundation working to provide opportunities for disadvantaged young women and girls to pursue an education in the STEM field by providing them with scholarships to start and complete university degrees. The organization had heard about me because of the visibility that the 2015 award gave me. Then the Peace Corp Nigeria Alumni Foundation contacted me. Albert Hanans contacted me and asked me to link up with my colleague, Professor M. B. Shittu to work on the Young Women Mentors Program.

Arewa24, a mainly Hausa TV program interviewed me in its feature program Tauraruwa (Star).  The interview has been well received and has been aired several times. Many young women have called me and expressed that they have been inspired and encouraged to go back or continue with school. Interestingly, many male viewers have also called to praise and to ask me to speak to their spouses and encourage them to go back to school or to give them advice on how to manage the home and school as I have done.

I am happy, we are getting there.

Rabia S. Sa'id, PhD
Associate Professor of Physics
Bayero University, Kano, Nigeria
Personal Website: http://www.rabiasaid.org
Email: rabia at rabiasaid.org
Please remember to use the correct format of email, with the @ sign and no spaces. It was written this way to prevent those nasty spambots from harvesting the email address.
Ford Foundation International Fellow (2002)
Fellow of the African Scientific Institute (2013)
OWSD/ Elsevier Foundation Award in Physics (2015)