OAU’S ADEBOOYE WINS GERMAN AWARD
The foremost leadership position which Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, enjoys among Universities in Nigeria and indeed, Africa as a whole, received another boost recently with the emergence of one of the University’s dons, Professor Odunayo Adebooye, as the winner of the 2009 Humboldt Alumni Award by the Alexander Von Humboldt Foundation in Germany.
Professor Adebooye, a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Plant Science, is the first Nigerian to win the prestigious award valued at 25,000 euro having been selected from among other nominees last May.
He was presented the award on June 8, 2009 at a grand event marking the annual general meeting of the Humboldt Foundation held at Frei University, Berlin, with eminent Nobel Laurates and scientists from seventy (70) countries in attendance.
Prof. Adebooye, presently a short-term scientist at the Institute for Crop Science, University of Bonn, Germany, is known for his pet crop African Snake tomato (Trichosanthes cucumerina) on which he has done painstaking physiological research.
He was granted a Georg Forster Research Fellowship by the Foundation in 2006, and currently a research fellow at the Institute of Horticultural Sciences at Bonn University following the sponsorship provided by Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.
Prof. Adebooye, with the support of other Humboldtians, initiated an African-German Research Network.
