Female leader and role model – Dr Addisalem Abathun

ISP would like to recognise Dr Addisalem Abathun for her contribution to women leadership in mathematics in Ethiopia.

Dr Addisalem was an ISP sandwich student between Addis Ababa University (AAU), Ethiopia, and Stockholm University, Sweden. She graduated in 2016 as the first female PhD graduate of the Department of Mathematics of AAU! Since 2019 Dr Addisalem is the Dean of College of Natural and Computational Sciences, one of the biggest colleges at Addis Ababa University with a total of 847 staff. She is the first female dean in the 70th year history of the college!

Dr Addisalem´s research area is in pure mathematics mainly on analysis. She is interested in application of the theory of functions of complex variables. Particularly, roots of hypergeometric functions, sub-harmonic functions of one/several complex variables.

Dr Addisalem, what got you interested in mathematics in the first place?

- My elementary school teacher made me interested in studying mathematics when I was in grade 5. One day he awarded me a 5 cents candy since I was the only one who gave the correct answer to the question he asked! After that he called me the Queen of Mathematics.

What´s your experience of being the first female PhD students and the first female dean?

- As the first female student of the department of mathematics at AAU, I have often been worried and spent more time on my study since I didn´t have confidence in myself. Finally I realized that I was far better than everyone else in the group!

As a first female dean of the big college, one of the challenges has been not having any role model (i.e. female leader) to contact or to talk with.

Also, the balance between career and personal life is hard. The institution needs me to devote more time and at the same time my two children and husband need me to be with them. In addition, most of the communities were saying “she is a female with a family so she couldn’t properly manage her time to lead the college”, so I focused on my leadership job so as to disprove this idea. And I successfully did it.

What did ISP support mean to you and your group?

ISP’s support means a lot to me. It helps me to develop my capacity and it becomes a road light to my journey. I thank ISP for giving me the opportunity to learn and grow. The expertise that I got from Swedish professors particularly, my advisor Prof Rikard Bögvad, Dr Paul Vaderlind and ISP´s Leif Abrahamsson (the Swedish father of department of mathematics AAU!) is extremely valuable. I will definitely continue to collaborate with my Swedish colleagues.

What are your future plans?

I want to collaborate with women researchers in the region to get more women in the field of mathematics. Moreover, I planned to work with my colleagues and partners to train women to become best leaders. As a leader I already formed a women only research group where we women discuss possible problems, share experience in grant writing and applying for research calls. I also continue to strengthening mentor-mentee relations to encourage young female staff to come to the front as leaders as well as researchers.

Thank you ISP for everything you have done for my study and career without your help I wouldn’t be here today.

Thanks to you, Dr Addisalem, for being such an inspiration!