ICGEB makes great effort to promote Women in Science. The latest initiative has been carried out thanks to the support of the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation. Five women scientists have been granted a six-month fellowship to work on their research at the ICGEB components in New Delhi and Cape Town.
The EMPOWER project has been launched to promote early-career women scientists from developing countries. It is an effective South-South Triangular Cooperation programme to foster careers and strengthen the expertise of young researchers from developing countries from South America, Africa and South Asia. The project is under the umbrella of the Youth4South initiative of the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation (UNOSSC) and was designed to promote youth leadership and capacity development for achieving the sustainable development goals of quality education (SDG4) and gender equality (SDG5).
The programme, launched in mid 2022, saw awardees experience the ICGEB labs, gain expertise and know-how in several fields of biotechnology, ranging from infectious diseases and non-communicable diseases to sustainable agriculture and industrial biotechnology.
To celebrate the success of this project, the UNOSSC will be launching the EMPOWER videos on International Women’s Day – 8 March 2023 at LDC5 in Doha, Qatar – documenting these women’s journey, produced by ICGEB.
Ruvarashe Loveness Mhuruyengwe
is from Zimbabwe and moved to Cape Town to investigate the genetic characteristics of Sorghum cultivars able to tolerate drought.
Lida Carolina Lesmes Rodriguez
moved from Colombia to Cape Town to study the influence of common human coronaviruses on the immune system in COVID-19 patients.
Najneen Rejwana
from Bangladesh, moved to New Delhi to design and develop new antimalarial drug compounds.
Maria Mgella Zinga
from Tanzania spent her fellowship in Cape Town to identify new possible biomarkers for Plasmodium falciparum infections to enhance the potential to detect malaria cases.
Nadine Tambwe
originally from the Democratic Republic of Congo – Congo DRC, currently in Cape Town to study new possibilities for an improved and effective therapy of prostate cancer.