VISITING SCHOLARS FROM ZAMBIA

by Garth Myers, Ass't. Professor of Geography /AAAS and Initiator of Exchange program with UNZA

This summer from July 11 to August 10, Africanist community in Kansas University will have four visiting scholars on campus from the University of Zambia as a part of the Department of State University Affiliations grant between KU and the University of Zambia. In this newsletter Garth Myers will give short description for each scholar. Africanist scholars and students are required to make a note of shared interests they might have with any of the four scholars. They are also requested to welcome each of these visitors since this is the first time to the US for all four, so we all need to find ways to welcome them besides scholarly consultations.

Iwake Masialeti is a geographer. He is presently a lecturer in the UNZA Department of Geography. He teaches courses in GIS, Remote Sensing, and Cartography, as well as Rural Geography. He has worked on a number of major national and international research teams, with his own area of expertise in land use land cover monitoring and change detection (using GIS and RS). He has headed the Cartographic and Location Analysis Unit in the Zambian National Council for Scientific Research that produced an Atlas of the Population of Zambia. Mr. Masialeti also is interested in the use of indigenous knowledge in natural resource conservation.. He has an MS in Rural and Land Ecology Survey from Enschede in The Netherlands (1990) and a BA in Geography from UNZA (1983).

John Volk is a lecturer in the Department of Geography at UNZA. He has a B.Sc. in Natural Resources and an M.Sc. in Forest Science, both from UNZA. He teaches land resource survey, environment and natural resources management, soils, and Environment and Development. He worked with the Soil Productivity Research Program of the Zambian Ministry of Agriculture before taking his lectureship appointment. He has an extensive list of publications and research reports, most related to alley cropping and other methods of agroforestry. Mr. Volk has deep interests in soil fertility and chemistry issues for the tropics, as well as in indigenous technical knowledge applications to natural resource management.

Simon Nkemba, is a researcher in the Computo-Geological Advisory Unit of the Geology Department within the UNZA School of Mines. He is focused currently on the CGAU project on the Serenje-Kanona gemstone area, for the application of GIS and Remote Sensing to mineral exploration. He has worked on this issue of digital data applications in mineral exploration, but also on applied environmental topics such as solid waste disposal in the Lusaka area. Mr. Nkemba received his B.Sc. in Geology from University of Zambia and is currently completing an M.Sc. in the UNZA linkage with the University of Ghent. He worked for several years as an exploration and drainage geologist with the Zambia Consolidated Copper Mines (Ltd.) in Mufulira on the Copper-belt.

Daniel Nkhuwa is a lecturer at the School of Mines at UNZA in Environmental Geology. He also teaches engineering, hydrogeology, mining and the environment, and mineral resource evaluation. He has been Assistant Dean for Postgraduate Studies in the UNZA School of Mines. Dr. Nkhuwa received his Ph.D. in Geology in 1996 from Aachen University of Technology in Germany, and an M.Sc. and Post-Graduate Diploma from ITC/Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands. His BSc came from UNZA, in Mineral Sciences. He has received numerous scholarships and fellowships in his career and also worked in the field, as a mining geologist with ZCCM. Dr. Nkhuwa has many publications. Many of them concern groundwater resources (water supply, sanitation, waste disposal) in urban planning in Lusaka, an interest he has taken into his involvement with the Sustainable Lusaka Program.