By Leah Campbell | MIT News

It’s a tale familiar to many first-generation students: Neither of Lawrence Udeigwe’s parents had more than a sixth-grade education, and yet they were willing to sacrifice everything to educate their children.

“My dad,” Udeigwe says, “would tell us, ‘I’m ready to sell everything for you guys to go to school.’”

Udeigwe recounts that in Nigeria at the time, achieving the sort of success and stability his parents hoped for meant studying something practical and working for the government. So, he moved to the United States, enrolled at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, and majored in computer science.

By Adejayan Gbenga Gsong | Within Nigeria

Nigeria’s Toyin Tofade has been appointed as the first black female president of the Albany College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences (ACPHS) founded in 1881. According to a press release by the college, Ms Tofade was selected to become the 10th president of the college, following a comprehensive search.

“Dr Tofade is the first Black woman to serve as president of Albany College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences in the college’s 141-year history. She begins her term on July 1, 2022,” the release said.

By Kylie Foy | MIT Lincoln Laboratory

“My day-to-day is forming relationships,” says Chiamaka Agbasi-Porter, Lincoln Laboratory’s K–12 STEM outreach coordinator. Each July, when Chiamaka Agbasi-Porter welcomes a new group of high school seniors to MIT Lincoln Laboratory’s two-week residential radar program, she starts with a question: Who here is applying to MIT?

By Anna Azvolinsky | The Scientist

Not long after starting a job as the head of a chemistry lab at a high school in Benin City, Nigeria, Charles Rotimi told his parents that he wanted to leave his native country to pursue a graduate degree abroad. He applied to a petrochemical engineering school in the UK and to the University of Mississippi for a health care administration degree, at the advice of a Nigerian friend working there. Rotimi chose the US school because of the cheaper tuition. His mother, who ran her own business, offered Rotimi $10,000, enough for a year in the States. “That was a huge amount of money for my family and a validation that she had confidence and trust in my succeeding,” says Rotimi, now director of the Center for Research on Genomics and Global Health at the US National Institutes of Health.