AAP's relationship to its advisory board members are maintained through and after their term. AAP is proud of its current outstanding advisory board members as well as our previous advisory board members.
Kwesi Brookins
Vice Provost for University Outreach and Engagement
Michigan State University, MI, United States
Email:
Kwesi Brookins is Michigan State University’s vice provost for University Outreach and Engagement. He comes to MSU from NC State University where he served as vice provost for University Outreach and Engagement, director of the Center for Family and Community Engagement, and as a professor in Applied Social and Community Psychology and Interdisciplinary Studies (Africana Studies).
Throughout his years at NC State, Dr. Brookins founded the Africana Studies program where he led the establishment of the Africana Studies Major and Minor degree programs. He directed Africana Studies and the Africa Project from 1997 to 2010. During that time, he established study abroad programs in Ghana (West) and Tanzania (East) and incubated several others on the continent of Africa. Dr. Brookins also took the lead on an initiative with Wake County designed to address significant community-identified needs within the county, and the city of Raleigh. This initiative connects community partners with university faculty, students, and resources in ways that are reciprocal and designed to generate collective community impacts.
In recent years Dr. Brookins was the lead organizer and author on NC State University’s Civic Action Plan, a member of the Community of Engaged Faculty Fellows, and a charter member of the Academy of Outstanding Faculty Engaged in Extension at NC State. In 2018-19, he was an American Council of Education Fellow where he focused on best practices in urban community engagement with universities across the United States and Canada.
Emmanuel Kaunda
Email:
Emmanuel Kaunda is currently the Vice Chancellor of Lilongwe University of Agriculture and Natural Resources in Malawi. He is a Professor in Fisheries Science having worked for over 30 years in Fisheries ecology, Fish Trade, Fisheries Policy and development of Aquaculture in Africa, and he was accorded the Aqua-culturist of Year award by the Aquaculture Association of Southern Africa (AASA) in 2011. He currently serves on the Board of Africa Centre for Aquatic Research and Education (ACARE) and is current President of Pan Africa Fish and Fisheries Association (PAFFA). He is also a Past Robbin Welcome Fellow at Michigan State University. Professor Kaunda also serves as a Board Chair for the National Commission of Science and Technology (NCST) in Malawi. Professor Emmanuel Kaunda has mad remarkable contributions to the African continent, particularly within the fisheries sector and the higher education sector more broadly. As a respected leader and scholar in his discipline, Professor Kaunda possesses invaluable insights and perspectives that can provide the AAP with strategic guidance of the highest calibre. His dedication to advancing education and his commitment to transformative change align perfectly with the AAP's mission to create a lasting impact and improve the lives of people across Africa.
Somachi Chris-Asoluka
Email:
Somachi Chris-Asoluka is the CEO of the Tony Elumelu Foundation (TEF). She was most recently the Director of Partnerships and Communications for the Tony Elumelu Foundation (TEF), the leading philanthropy empowering young African entrepreneurs from all 54 African countries. In this role, Somachi oversaw marketing, communications, policy, advocacy, and partnerships for the Foundation. She leads TEF’s efforts to build strategic relationships with stakeholders, multilateral organizations, development institutions, civil society, foundations, and other key development partners to support African entrepreneurs and mobilize capital investments in these small businesses. She leads the Foundation's regional and global external engagements and oversees TEF’s global brand strategy and positioning.
Linley Chiwona-Karltun
Email:
Linley Chiwona-Karltun is currently an Associate Professor, in the Department of Rural Development, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU). She is Malawian / Swedish and has externally funded projects with institutions in South, East and West Africa from SIDA and other funding agencies. Professor Chiwona-Karltun visited MSU in 2019 and was part of a team working on an insects innovation proposal that was submitted internally for the MacArthur Foundation $100 million grant competition. She is the President of the Association of African Agricultural Professionals in the Diaspora - Europe (AAAPD-E) MSU (through the European Studies Center) and SLU are members of the Global Challenges University Alliance (GCUA). Leverage SLU and other European institutions to work with AAP members on external funding from European sources.
Dorothy Ngila
Director
Science Granting Council Initiative & Resource Partnerships Development at the South African National Research Foundation
Pretoria, South Africa
Dorothy Ngila is the Director: Science Granting Council Initiative (SGCI) and Resource Partnerships Development at the South African National Research Foundation (NRF). Her core responsibility is to coordinate the NRF’s contribution to the multi-stakeholder and multi-agency capacity strengthening programme, the SGCI in sub-Saharan Africa, which serves 15 public science granting councils in East, West and Southern Africa. She is chair of the Organization for Women in Science for the Developing World (OWSD) South African National Chapter; and serves on the Global Research Council (GRC) Gender Working Group, both advancing conversations and actions promoting the equality and status of women in research. Prior to joining the NRF, she served in various capacities within the international partnerships programme of the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf). Ms Ngila is currently completing her PhD in Science and Technology Studies at Stellenbosch University, and has a Masters degree in Geography and Environmental Management from the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN), South Africa and a Bachelor of Arts (Public Administration and Environmental Sciences) from the University of Botswana.
Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, PhD
Senior Advisor for Strategic Initiatives
Office of the President
Howard University, Washington, DC United States
Email:
Paul Tiyambe Zeleza is Senior Advisor for Strategic Initiatives and Professor of African Studies at Howard University. Previously he was Associate Provost and the North Star Distinguished Professor at Case Western Reserve University (2021-2023), after serving as Vice Chancellor (President) and Professor of the Social Sciences and Humanities at the United States International University (USIU) in Kenya from 2016-2021. Prior to that he held distinguished academic and administrative positions as College Principal (Trent University, Canada), Director of the Center for African Studies (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Professor of History and African and African American Studies (Pennsylvania State University), Chair of the Department of African American Studies (University of Illinois at Chicago), Dean of the College of Liberal Arts (Loyola Marymount University), and Vice President for Academic Affairs (Quinnipiac University).
He received his bachelor’s degree (with distinction) at the University of Malawi, master’s at the University of London in Britain, and PhD at Dalhousie University in Canada. He started his academic career at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, followed by Kenyatta University in Kenya. In the early 2000s, he worked as a consultant for the Ford and MacArthur foundations on their initiatives to revitalize higher education in Africa. His research project on the African academic diaspora conducted for the Carnegie Corporation of New York in 2011-12 led to the establishment of the Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship Program in 2013 that has to date sponsored more than 600 African born academics in the United States and Canada to work with more than 170 universities in nine African countries.
An interdisciplinary scholar, his work covers the fields of African economic history, development studies, intellectual history, diaspora studies, gender studies, human rights studies, cultural studies, and literary studies. He has published more than 400 journal articles, book chapters, encyclopedia entries, reviews, short stories, and online essays and authored or edited 28 books and five short monographs. Several of his books have won international awards. His forthcoming books include Re-envisioning African and American Universities (2024), and The Chronicles of African University Leaders (2024), a volume of reflections by former vice chancellors of some of Africa’s leading universities. He has published two collections of short stories and an acclaimed novel that is being turned into a movie.
A much sought-after speaker, he has presented over 300 keynote addresses, papers, and public lectures at leading universities and international conferences in 32 countries. He has also served on the editorial boards of more than two dozen journals and book series. He currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Oxford Bibliographies Online in African Studies. He has received numerous awards from major universities and various organizations for his scholarship. In July 2013, he was recognized in The New York Times as one of 43 Great Immigrants in the United States. In May 2015, he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws at Dalhousie University for outstanding personal achievement. In 2015, he was a fellow at Harvard University during which he wrote The Transformation of Global Higher Education, 1945-2015 (2016). In 2018, he received the Thabo Mbeki Award for Leadership. In 2022, he was awarded the W.E.B. Dubois Fellowship at Harvard to work on The Long Transition to the 21st Century: A Global History of the Present.
He has held the positions of Honorary Professor at the University of Cape Town since 2006 and at the Nelson Mandela University since 2019. He has served in more than two dozen international and national associations, most recently on the Administrative Board of the International Association of Universities, the Advisory Board of the Alliance for African Partnership, University of Ghana Council (Board of Trustees), Chair of the Advisory Council of the Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship Program, and Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Kenya Education Network. In 2008-2009, he served as President of the U.S. African Studies Association. He has raised tens of millions of dollars for institutional advancement and personal research. He is most proud of the $63.2 million grant from the Mastercard Foundation USIU received in 2020 to provide scholarships for 1,000 students from across Africa for ten years.
African Futures:
Fifth cohort of scholars announced
Partnerships for Innovative Research in Africa:
8 research teams awarded
AAP Bridge:
Connect and
collaborate online
Doctoral Dissertation
Support Fund
now available
