Professor Azikiwe Peter Onwualu, FAS. Acting President, African University of Science and Technology (AUST)

In a bid to strengthen investment in Research and Innovations, the African University of Science and Technology (AUST) has established an Entrepreneurship Hub to attract funding for discoveries and commercialize products from the institution.

Established in 2007 in Abuja as centre of excellence, the AUST according to its Acting President, Prof. Peter Onwualu has not only expanded but has continued to produce manpower needs for the technological development of Africa

Speaking with Innovation Nigeria Magazine in Abuja on recent breakthroughs by the University, Professor Onwualu said the hub is running an incubation for the University’s students that would ultimately create jobs and become employers of Labour in Africa.

“We have created what we call AUST INSPIRE which is innovation and entrepreneurship arm of the University and with the support of African Development Bank and World Bank that hub is now running. In fact, as I speak with you, we are running an incubation program for our students and a few people from outside.

“We are no longer producing just academics we are also producing those who can be job creators and those who will be innovators, you can be a pure academics if you want to get your Ph.D and go to university and teach but you can also get your Ph.D and become a consultant on a product and  you can establish your own company or even if you are working in an industry, you can still be an innovator, not just an academics but a mixture of academic and industry” he said.

The Prof. of Agriculture Engineering also said the vision of the Ivory tower is to venture into difficult terrains with the primary objective of giving Africa a voice in global pursuit of what will be of immense benefits to mankind.

To this end, Onwualu said African University of Science and Technology has taken a giant step into research that would provide early discovery of solutions to breast and prostate cancer in Africa.

According to him “We have a high level research group working on Cancer and they have been working on breast cancer and prostate Cancer. These are two major diseases that have been causing devastations all over Africa. They have been able to use the science of Nanotechnology to come up with technology for early diagnosis, drug delivery and management of cancer.

“Ordinarily, we would have finished the research and publish but in this case, we have involved the National Hospital and that research has gone for animal trials. It means that if the animal trials are successful, the next stage would be human trial and then you have a candidate drug from this particular process”

Aside research in the health sector, Prof. Onwualu said AUST hoped to achieve breakthrough in the area of Renewable Energy with particular focus on Solar Power and Battery Energy Storage.

“We have another team called renewable energy group dealing with the issue of solar, the issue of battery and energy storage, they have also perfected methods of producing battery especially for our hand held devices. This is an area that we believe with time and with our innovation, we will get to a point where the small batteries will be produced for the markets. Our aim really is that we are looking at the concept of autonomous electric Vehicles”

“For you to have electric vehicles, you must have very functional batteries; the good news is that recently a large deposit of lithium was discovered in Nigeria. Battery that drive electric vehicles are based on lithium cell and we have people in our land who have perfected the process, the only thing now is that we are driving them to move to actual products” Prof. Onwualu said.

In the building sector, the President of AUST said he had also set up another research group to come up with sustainable building materials, according to him “almost every building you see in Nigeria is made from cement, we can also reduce the consumption of cement by looking for alternatives, a number of students have worked on alternative sustainable building materials base on the use of bio mass and earth base materials.

This group of people have come up with new materials and we are in the process of finding how to make people to use the materials for construction”.

A cross section of post graduate Students at AUST

On expansion of academic programmes to accommodate undergraduates, Prof. Onwualu dismissed alleged compromise on high academic standards, insisting that only students with higher scores as entry requirements are given admission in AUST. He stated that only those with second class upper are admitted for post graduate courses.

“To earn a Ph.D here you must publish at least two papers in the Scruples Index Journals, one of the highest data bases. That standard is still there and we still make use of all the external partners that we have. We still have our professors here with those professors from diaspora, so there is no compromise in standards, AUST is still the same high quality research based university. The only thing is that we have also added entrepreneurship and innovation to the system. What that means is that we are no longer just publishing research and papers in journals but also translating some of those research results into goods and services.