Math capacity builder - Dr Tilahun Abebaw

ISP would like to recognise Dr Tilahun Abebaw for his important work to build research capacity in Ethiopia.

Dr Tilahun Abebaw started his career at Addis Ababa University (AAU), Ethiopia, where he obtain his bachelor´s and master´s degree in mathematics. He was an ISP Sandwich PhD student between AAU and Stockholm University, Sweden between 2006 to 2009.

- With the supports from ISP lots of staff members and Mathematicians from other Ethiopia universities were trained and got their PhD degrees and that is helping to build the capacities of Mathematics Departments in Ethiopian universities.

Dr Tilahun is today working at the Department of Mathematics at AAU and is involved in both teaching and research. The staff at the department are conducting research in both pure and applied mathematics. Dr Tilahun’s research area is in pure mathematics, more precisely in Algebra.

Since 2013 he is the group leader the ISP supported mathematics research group at AAU. The overall objective of the research group is to build the research capacity of the Department of Mathematics and that the department can run research and graduate training by its staff in the future. The group has been supported by ISP since 2005.

So far (in 2021), four sandwich students from AAU have graduated with a PhD and four are ongoing. Since the PhD program at AAU started the department has also graduated 33 PhDs during the period 2014 to 2020, and they have 33 ongoing PhD-students in the local program. The ISP funding is also used to support the local PhD programs, and among other things to support expatriates to give courses and to supervise the students.

- I would like to thank Sweden for the enormous support to us and my thanks also goes to the ISP team being led by Leif Abrahamsson. Almost all of the current and former ISP Sandwich students in Mathematics, including myself, consider Leif as our Swedish Father, as he and his team always treated us as like a father.

Keep up the good work, Dr Tilahun! We are happy that you are a part of the ISP family.