Habtu Hailu Zegeye, a former ICTP Diploma Student and now Junior Associate, is returning to Trieste as a Fellow of ICTP's Training and Research in Italian Laboratories (TRIL) programme.

Challenging Ethiopia's Math Deficit

When Habtu Hailu Zegeye arrived in Trieste this July from his home country Ethiopia, he certainly didn't need a map to get around. After all, this marked the third time in the past six years that he would be spending a good deal of time in the Italian port city that hosts ICTP's secretariat.
His first visit, a one-year stay, took place in 1995-1996 when he was a student in the Centre's Diploma Course programme. He returned to ICTP in the summer of 1999 for a three-month stay and came back again in the summer of 2000, both times as an ICTP Junior Associate. His visits enabled him to take advantage of the Centre's facilities and busy summer-time curriculum to advance his own research agenda in mathematics, which focusses on nonlinear functional analysis and applications.
For the next 12 months, he will be living and working in Trieste as a Fellow of ICTP's Training and Research in Italian Laboratories (TRIL) programme, working under a cooperative arrangement between ICTP and the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA), an Italian institution of higher education located next door to the Centre. Zegeye notes that he will be "spending much of his time doing research in his areas of expertise," which he anticipates "will lead to a series of publications in international journals." He also plans to attend courses at ICTP, SISSA and perhaps other research institutions in Italy.
Zegeye's periodic journeys to Trieste have proven instrumental in helping him achieve his most cherished career objective: To live and work in Ethiopia as a university teacher and researcher without being isolated from the global mathematics community.
He earned his undergraduate degree from Addis Ababa University in central Ethiopia in 1985. He concentrated primarily on mathematics and physics but also set aside time for education courses helping him acquire valuable pedagogical skills that would later serve him well as an instructor.
With his bachelor's degree in hand, Zegeye decided to continue his education at Addis Ababa University, taking courses from 1989 to 1991 after teaching mathematics at Arba Minch high school. "The teaching methods at the university," he notes, "were largely based on lectures and the rote retention of information. Teachers," he adds, "did a commendable job under a difficult situation." Poor facilities and a lack of course books or journals posed the most serious obstacles to learning. "Computer facilities were not available and recent books and journals were hard to come by," he notes. "As a result, lectures were usually the sole source of information."
Zegeye admits that he never really stopped seeking ways to continue his university training. "I realised that my need for financial aid and having earned both my bachelor's and master's degrees in Ethiopia would likely hinder my progress." Nevertheless, he enrolled in Addis Ababa University for a second master's degree, this time focusing exclusively on numerical analysis and algorithms. After completing this degree, Zegeye was appointed a lecturer at Bahir Dar University in Bahir Dar, Ethiopia.

Zegeye earnestly began his search for a Ph.D. programme in 1999, the same year that ICTP's Mathematics Group and Office of External Activities joined forces to launch a Ph.D. initiative targeted for students in sub-Saharan Africa. The ultimate goal of the initiative, designed in partnership with universities in sub-Saharan Africa, was to allow students to remain within the region while earning their degrees.
"The programme was an ideal fit for my circumstances," Zegeye notes. "I applied and was soon accepted for entrance into the mathematics doctorate programme at the University of Nigeria in Nsukka. With help from ICTP I could once again pursue my career ambitions."
This June, Zegeye's ongoing journey passed another milestone when he was awarded a doctorate in mathematics. Today he is back in Trieste advancing his knowledge and honing his skills even further.
Zegeye would like nothing better than to have his extraordinary trips between Ethiopia and Italy to lead to nothing more than an ordinary existence at home where his professional responsibilities would be defined by the three pillars of university life worldwide: teaching, research and community service.

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