 It's a rather special day today. Today's the first colloquium being organized by our partner institute, EFER. It's just based in Kigali in Rwanda. So welcome to all of you. Without further ado, I'm going to hand over the chair to the director of EFER, Professor Omololo Akin Ojo. Omololo. Okay. Thank you very much and we welcome everybody to this first colloquium online. So before I introduce the director of the ICTP, Professor Atish Daboka. Dr. Ali Hassan Ali will give a short introduction about EFER. Some of you may already know about EFER. Maybe others don't. So we'll give a short introduction about EFER, like a two-minute introduction, and then Professor Atish Daboka, the ICTP director, will introduce our speaker, Professor Waleesh Ogoejo. Africa's huge population of young people has the potential to solve global problems, including those that are prevalent in Africa. Many of these problems can be solved through science and technology. Physics represents an important bedrock of these solutions. At the ICTP East African Institute for Fundamental Research, we focus on using physics to make significant contributions to Africa. At the same time, we train others to do the same. The ICTP East African Institute for Fundamental Research, based in Kigali, Rwanda, was established to address Africa's need for better physics education, training, and advanced research. Rwanda's policy of advancement through science makes it the natural location to host a world-class physics center. The institute is located at University of Rwanda and is a vibrant international science hub aimed to become the most important physics institute in Africa. The institute offers a rich program of international scientific conferences, schools, and workshops, some in collaboration with top international physics institutes. It will also act as a node for various physics networks in Africa. The institute's educational and research offerings include Masters of Science and PhD degree programs in physics, postdoctoral fellowships, a visitors program that attracts world-renowned scientists to develop research capacity among African scientists, research investigating condensed matter physics, and high-energy cosmology and astroparticle physics, workshops and short courses to build capacity in Africa. The East African Institute for Fundamental Research is a partner institute of one of the world's foremost leaders in theoretical physics, research and education, the Abdus-Salaam International Center for Theoretical Physics, based in Trieste, Italy. ICTV was established in 1964 and since then has contributed to the development of many scientists and physicists, receiving more than 100,000 scientists over the years. The East African Institute for Fundamental Research receives generous support from the government of Rwanda and is part of that country's science and technology ecosystem. It has been designated a UNESCO Category 2 Institute in recognition of its important role in building scientific capacity in Africa. Join us in our efforts to build a prosperous future for Africa through science. Yeah, thank you very much and we hope all of you can visit us at IFA, Rwanda, to work together on collaborative research. So now I introduce the director for the Abdus-Salaam International Center for Theoretical Physics, Prof. Satish Taboka and he will introduce our guest speaker for today. Thank you. You need to unmute your mic. Thanks. Yeah, thank you Omar. It's a great pleasure for me and to open this first colloquium at IFER. IFER is a very important sister organization for us as a partner institute. And we saw this very nice video. We really look forward to, you know, this institute growing and really becoming one of the best, one of the top centers in physics in Africa. And I think today's lecture is actually very interesting. And in fact, I know that today's speaker, Wole, from before, we had the pleasure of meeting him in Trieste. He actually has been on the Scientific Council of ICTP for many years and he has contributed enormously to our institute. And I'm very happy that he's continued this engagement as the chair of the Scientific Council of IFER. He was the Bernard Gordon Dean of Engineering and Professor of Engineering Leadership at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute. And he's currently the Provost and Senior Vice President at the same institute. And I have already said that he was, he has a long association with ICTP, both with ICTP in Trieste and with our partner institute. And the topic is really very interesting to me. I'm really looking forward to hearing his thoughts on what are the new frontiers in Africa. Okay, I will leave it to Omo to give a more scientific introduction to this work. Thank you, Ateesh. Thank you very much. So Profola is going to show his slide now. Okay, hold on. Not now, please, not now, please, no. Okay. Hold on a second, please. Okay. So while we're here, I want to introduce one of our panelists to us, somebody who is very important. This is Professor Amadou Agay. He is the President of the African Physical Society. So he's one of the panelists that will be taking questions and coordinating things with us. So Professor Agay, please, could you say hi to everybody? Okay, hello, everybody. Okay. You hear me now? Yes, we hear you, Prof. Okay, thank you, Professor Omanulu for introducing me. Okay, and it is with a great pleasure that I am participating through the equilibrium of the ICTP. So this is a very great initiative. And I think that we are going to listen one of the best African scientists so that I am really happy to participate. Okay, thank you very much, Prof. Yeah. So Prof. Oley, I met him in December 2008 and then later on in 2012 and he was very instrumental in getting me to be focused on research and teaching for African Development and Advancement. He's involved with MS for SSA, that's Master of Science for South Saharan Africa, which is a training program for secondary schools. Like you know, he has a PhD in materials from the University of Cambridge. He was a professor until 2016. He's Provost and Senior VP at WPR. And like Professor Atitabaoka said, he's the Chair of EFAS Scientific Council. So he'll be telling us more about, there are plus about work on cancer detection using nanoparticles and then also work about perovskites where they have found that when they apply pressure they're able to increase the efficiency of perovskite solar cells. And I think you will tell us a bit about how we can contribute to the fight against COVID-19 as physicists. Okay, so Prof. Oley, over to you. Thank you. Thank you, thank you, Atish, Professor Wage and Ali. It's a pleasure for me to be here to share with you some of my experiences with working collectively with African scientists on frontiers of physics, especially as applied to materials. Now, I'm at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. I came here from Princeton. But what really attracted me to WPI is this combination of theory and practice. And if you look at these two towers in this first view graph, they show the two original towers at WPI that represent theory and practice. And that's what you're gonna see as a theme that runs through here. A lot of the work that I'm gonna be presenting was done actually in collaboration with students and faculty at the African University of Science and Technology in Abuja. This is a university that was built about 12 years ago. And I was one of the founders of this. And it was an honor for me to serve as the president and provost of this university for a while. And to work with really some of the brightest and most promising African academics and scientists in the world. So the work I'm gonna be showing today is a reflection of group effort. And what I'm going to argue is that for Africa to have success, we need to have group success. And this is just an example of how you bring people together from physics, chemistry, biology, engineering into one collective effort trying to address African challenges. And so for me, the challenges that we're interested in are challenges related to health. So you have to understand things from a cellular level, challenges related to water purification. You need to understand membranes and how they work in a way that you can then manipulate to solve challenges in drinking contaminated water. There are also challenges, of course, related to energy all across Africa. And the question is, what are the opportunities for us to harness the different approaches to energy to solve our problems using physics? And then there are challenges related to sustainable housing that have to do with not just how you make sustainable building materials that are robust physically, but also how you harness the energy from the sun by natural processes, such as convection conduction in ways that you can engineer into a building. Now, today, due to lack of time, I'm just going to focus on issues related to health and energy, just to give us some examples of the key role of physics in some of these efforts. So I'm gonna look at the key role of physics because for me, physics is how you understand nature. And when you really understand nature, you understand the forces that cause change and you can control matter, energy and waves. Now, as simple as that sounds, the fundamental understanding that then emerges guides the development of solutions in ways that enable much of what we see around us to happen. Then the question is, what's the inspiration for the use of this understanding? And so for me, when I walk through an African village where there is no electricity, I ask myself, how can we harness physics to solve these problems? To provide electricity for people in the poorest parts of Africa in ways that are enabled by physics. When I see an African woman that has breast cancer, I ask myself, how can we use physics to enhance the imaging of those tumors without necessarily having to buy the most expensive equipment? How can we do basic research that impacts this? And how do we image these challenges in ways that allow us to develop new solutions to these challenging problems in an African context? So where this leads us to is to say, well, if you think about the different ways of diagnosing cancer as an example, many of these are based on techniques that are well developed, but haven't been done with fundamental research that is motivated by an African context. And so how do we begin to link some of the work we do at a basic level with new ways of detecting and treating cancer that can be helpful to people? Now, what this does is it takes me back then to a molecular understanding of cells and the effort to really understand cells at a biophysical mechanical level in a way that allows us to tell the differences between non-tumogenic cells and tumor-genic cells. And so within that context, I have to then introduce a number of methods to probe the cell. So one of the things I can do is I can use nanomechanical methods to probe the cell to see if there are differences in the adhesion to cancer cells or the mechanical properties of cancer cells. I may also use laser tweezers to probe the cell to see if I can detect differences in the cancer cell compared to those of the normal cell. And then in some cases, I may use traction force microscopy or shear assay methods to shear the cells in ways that can enable us to tell the difference at the cellular level or the molecular level between cancer cells and normal cells. And what we've done for the last 20 years is been to experiment with these different methods and try to see if we can learn some things about cancer cells at the nanoscale level, at the micron scale level, and then at the macro level in ways that can inform the detection and the treatment of cancer. And so if I look, for example, at the nano level, I can take an atomic microscopy probe tip. And if I conjugate it to molecular recognition units that can interact with receptors on the surfaces of breast cancer cells, I can actually probe to see if I can get increased adhesion between those receptors and the corresponding molecular recognition units on the AFM tip. And so when I do that, what I can show is that when I have the right molecular recognition unit, this could be a peptide such as a luteinizing hormone, releasing hormone. The interactions between the receptors can give me adhesive forces that are four times those in the absence of those molecular recognition units. So I may then begin to discriminate between cancer cells and non-cancer cells by these local nanoscale measurements of adhesive interactions. And what I can then show by staying in those cells is that I have an increase in the receptor densities by a factor of four, which actually scales with then the increase in the receptor molecular recognition unit interactions. And so the reason I get this increased adhesive force is that I have these increased adhesive interactions. And by the way, we've done these studies not only on biological cells, we've done them on tissue from animals with the same kind of breast cancer, but we've also done them on tissues extracted from African women with breast tumors. And we found similar kinds of trends where the increase in the adhesive interactions actually gives us a way of detecting the presence of the tumors. And then one can then begin to do molecular dynamic simulations that look at the interactions between the receptors and the molecular recognition units. And as you do those simulations with MDE simulations, you can now begin to understand the parts of the molecular recognition units that interact. You can also understand in a very basic way the origins of those interactions. And what you can show from those simulations is that in this particular case, the interactions between the tryptorellin ligands and the receptors are mostly electrostatic and then van der Waals and then hydrogen bonds. And so we now in this very basic way begin to understand how these kinds of interactions enable us then to have nanoparticles that can go in when we use these targets of LHRH, which promote increased adhesion. Now, another thing one can do is to try to see if you can discriminate between a cell that is non-tumogenic and a cell that is tumor-genic. And one other way of doing this is by flowing liquid over a cell in a microfluidic chamber. And if you track the local displacements of points on the cells, you can use that tracking along with digital image correlation to determine the local strain gradients from which you can extract information on the local cell mechanical properties. And so with this, you can determine the viscoelastic properties. And the hypothesis here is that those viscoelastic properties are different in tumor-genic cells compared to non-tumogenic cells. So if you look at the local displacements that we get from in situ imaging, you can now track these as a function of time. And from that tracking, you can extract the information on the strain as a function of time at different points within the cell. You can do this in the nucleus, you can do this in the cytoplasm, you can do this in organelles within the cell. And what you actually find is that the cell points creep as a function of time. And as with most materials subjected to deformation, you can see a three-stage creep that goes from primary to secondary creep. And you can also see that the creep in the nucleus is very different from the creep in the cytoplasm. And actually from doing analysis like this, we can now extract the viscoelastic properties of the nucleus and the viscoelastic properties of the cytoplasm. And by doing this, you can now begin to show, and we've done this now for quite a few cells, that there are significant differences between the viscoelastic properties of a tumor-genic cell, one with cancer, compared to the viscoelastic properties of the non-tumor-genic cell. So we can now use these kinds of measurements as biomechanical markers of the cancer. And what we're actually now doing is to look at the viscoelastic properties you measure in a non-tumor-genic cell. We find that generally those are high. And as the tumor progresses to a mid-state tumor, which is shown by this MD-468 cell, you have a reduction in the viscoelastic properties, the modulus and the viscosity to that mid-state tumor. And then when you have a metastatic tumor, which is the MB-231 cell, you have the lowest viscosity and the lowest modulus. So with measurements like this, you can begin to tell whether a cell is tumor-genic or not, or whether it's metastatic or not. And then if you do fluorescence microscopy on those, you also show that the distribution of the specific fluorescence proteins also reflect what I just showed. And so with methods like this, you can then begin to tell the difference between a cancer cell or a non-cancer cell, or even the difference between a metastatic cancer cell and a non-metastatic cancer cell. And then you can go one step further, which is to ask the question, is there a way that I can treat the tumors in ways that reduce potentially the side effects of the drugs that we have, or is there a way that I can image the tumor using nanoparticles that enhance the imaging of the tumor? So one inspiration that we had for thinking about this was looking at how viruses enter cells. So viruses tend to enter cells by interacting with receptors through a process of receptor mediated endocytosis. And then they interact with the receptors, enter into the cell and move through the cell and stay for a while until they are exocytosed after some time. So if one uses this idea, one can now imagine that you can pick nanoparticles the size of a virus compared to 30 nanometers. And then you interact with specific receptors with the objective of targeting either some molecular process that goes on in the cell or enabling imaging of the cell if you're dealing with magnetic nanoparticles or interactions as I'll show later on with lasers that enable us to do things that have an impact on the treatment of disease. So with these simple ideas, we can be inspired by nature to develop nanoparticles that's target specific receptors on the surfaces of cancer cells or any kind of disease cells. We can design the molecular recognition units so they have specific attachment to those receptors. And we can pick the nanoparticles to be magnetic or plasmonic depending on the specific kind of interactions that we want to have with the cells that we're attaching to. So we started playing with the idea of targeting breast cancer and other kinds of cancers by trying to identify the receptors that we can target. We can make these nanoparticles that target those receptors. And then if we make the particles magnetic, we can do MRI. If we make the particles plasmonic, we can interact with lasers. And so we have some model systems that we can study. So we synthesize these particles using nanoprecipitation methods. We also then study how these particles enter into cells in a very fundamental way. And so we've looked at the interactions between nanoparticles and receptors and we've studied in situ these processes by which the nanoparticles not only adhere to the receptors, but they induce curvature of the membranes. And so you then transport these due to the sort of combined effect of surface energy and elastic interactions with the membranes. If you look at this, you'll see that you can take in nanoparticle clusters into the cells. And in some cases, you can take them all the way into the nucleus, which means that you can do transfection. And so with this kind of basic understanding that we have been modeled theoretically, we can now also begin to think about how we might do similar experiments on more complex organisms such as animals. And so to do this, what you do is you inject the human breast cancer cells into the tail vein of the mouse. These human breast cancer cells now go in and induce the breast tumors. You can also inject the human breast cancer cells directly into the breast sections where they will induce the tumor of the human type in an animal model that grows the tumor at a relatively fast rate. So within seven to 14 days, you have an early breast tumor. Within 21 days, you have a mid-stage tumor. And within 28 days, you have a metastatic tumor with a size of about a centimeter. So at each of those stages, I can now image to see if I can see the tumor or I can inject a drug to see if I can shrink the tumor and understand the shrinkage dynamics. And I can also do things like interact light with nanoparticles in ways that give me lots of options as far as therapeutics. And it's actually the understanding of the physics in each of these conditions that allows us to do things that are unique and important. And so when we look then at say a metastatic tumor, which is what you get after 28 days, with magnetic resonance imaging, if you look to the image on my bottom left, you will see that the contrast in the one centimeter tumor is not very good. If you look at the image to the top left, you will see that the contrast is enhanced by the injection of the magnetic nanoparticles into the tumor. And I certainly have less than a millimeter resolution in my ability to detect the tumor. So the injection then of the magnetic nanoparticles has enabled us to enrich the contrast to have sub millimeter tumor. Now some of you might ask, why not have single cell detection? It turns out that at the level of single cell mutations that is not clinically relevant. On the other hand, when you have sub millimeter resolution in your ability to image a tumor, that's very significant in terms of clinical relevance and could save lots of lives. And we can verify with microscopy that the nanoparticles are in the tumor as is shown in the image label A to your right. Now beyond that you can now start doing whole body MRI where you can try to track as you inject the nanoparticles how the nanoparticles basically grow at the different stages of the tumor. And we've done this and what we basically shown is we can also resolve some of the metastasis in the lungs. Now, when you think about this the fact that you can image the tumors great but what's even more important is whether you can use this specific targeting to shrink the tumor. So for many, many years we tried to develop drug nanoparticle clusters but we found that the clusters were too big to target the tumor. If you remember, you need these clusters to be 30 nanometers or less. And so rather than developing drug nanoparticle clusters what we've been doing is to develop very specific liquid drugs that are conjugated with the molecular recognition unit to target the same kind of tumors that I described before. So we developed a new drug called prodigocin that we biosynthesize. And we also took a standard drug called Pactlytaxol. And in both cases, we conjugated to both drugs the molecular recognition unit, the LHH that we use as our target. And here's a key experiment that we did. So if you look in yellow in this image you see what happens to a tumor without drugs. The tumor grows and ultimately kills the mouse. That's shown in yellow. On the other hand, if you take a cancer drug like Pactlytaxol and you conjugate it to LHH you see in blue that the tumor shrinks and is eliminated within eight days. If you take our prodigocin drug and you again conjugate it to the same molecular recognition unit you see again that the tumor shrinks and is eliminated within eight days. So the specific targeting that's enabled by the increased adhesive interactions leads you to the development of a new drug chemistry that shrinks and eliminates the tumor in eight days. Whereas in the absence of those interactions you may shrink the tumor for a while but then it starts growing again. So what this enables is a method that has the potential to develop then the capability of not only shrinking tumors but eliminating them with small concentrations of drugs that reduce the side effects of cancer treatment. And where we are today is we now have the capability to have nanoparticles that target an image tumors in the breast. And we also have shown through this work that you can eliminate the tumors by having targeted drugs. So the method that we're exploring is one of theranostic nanoparticles that can both diagnose and treat using these kinds of fundamental insights that come from the experiments that we've done. And it turns out that because these are fundamental ideas you can apply them not only to breast tumors but to tumors of different kinds provided you understand the receptors, the receptor ligand interactions and the adhesive forces in ways that you can then control. Now one can then go one step further and then say once I get the nanoparticles into a tissue are there things that I can do to interact with light that will enable me to then induce other phenomena. And so what we've been doing is looking at interactions between Plasmonic Gold nanoparticles and more recently also with magnetite nanoparticles with incident laser beams and trying to understand the effects of heating that can be used to promote cell death by hypothermia or the potential effects of heating on triggering localized drug release that can shrink tumors. And so to do this you need to go to kind of model the laser materials interactions with Gaussian heat source distributions that basically enable us to simulate the effects of the phonon interactions and scattering that give rise to localized heating. And from these kinds of simulations we can begin to predict then the heat generation by the laser materials interactions as they interact with individual nanoparticles. And we can now begin to predict there knowing the thermal properties of the different tissue and the nanoparticles, the local effects of heating that we can induce due to these laser interactions. And so from simulations like this we can predict the spatiotemporal temperature evolution. And we can also look at various nanocomposite devices that we can insert into those regions to see how well we can control the temperature spatial distributions with known laser inputs. And so from simulations like this we're able then to basically model out the heat diffusion across the tissue. And we can now use that understanding either to induce local cell death or trigger off drug release that can enhance the cell death. And so from studies like this we're now better able to design them the next level of work that will then allow us to take this into scenarios where we can test these in animals and hopefully later in humans. And so before you can do these kinds of things what we do is we validate these experiments. And so we've set up in our lab scenarios in which we can interact with cell culture, media, biological cells as a precursor to do in the animal work. And what we find is that we can actually model and predict the temperature distributions that are associated with the nanoparticle interactions with the laser. And we can do these under various conditions including those associated with particle clusters around cells. And ultimately we've done breast simulations that allow us to basically predict the temperature revolution around the regions with the nanoparticle clusters. And we've shown that we have fairly good handle on being able to predict these temperature distributions in ways that could be relevant clinically. So as you can imagine, this is only the beginning because you can now take that temperature distribution and induce and trigger subsequent release of drugs using thermosensitive gels. And those gels can then release the drugs locally into those domain in addition to the therapeutic effects of the heat diffusion. So with methods like this, we are now in the process of taking all of these concepts and developing new devices that are driven by the physics. What gives me great pride is to think that over the last 20 years or so, this is in a way a reflection of the combined effort of several African scientists that have come together to work on a system like this that has a potential to create the next generation of therapeutic devices for cancer treatment. And by the way, this focus on breast cancer is just one example. A small focus that we have in our group has been some work we've been doing on the imaging of cervical cancer that kills also several African women due to poor diagnostics. This is work that's been done with one of my students who's from India. And what we ended up doing is taking the imaging method that you can get on a simple digital camera. And by processing those images to create a platform that can be connected to a telemedicine strategy where digital images taken with a simple camera can then be processed as a way of doing diagnosis of cervical cancer with imaging techniques. So using basic ideas of simple optics, image analysis, and molecular design, I hope that you can see from these examples just the power of many basic areas of physics in imaging and treating cancer in ways that we can drive from fundamental research to applications to impact the lives of people. So with that, I want to shift focus and talk a little bit about energy. And in Africa today, I'll say we have an energy crisis in the midst of plenty. If you look at the energy resources of Africa from the Nile in Egypt down to Kenya, we have a geothermal energy resource that could provide a third of the continent's energy needs. If you look across the Sahara Desert, we have enough solar energy across the Sahara Desert that could provide a third of all the continent's energy needs. If you look at the single drop of the Congo River, we can also provide a third of Africa's energy needs. So between the geothermal resources of the Eastern North Africa and the Sahara Desert and its solar energy resource and the hydra energy resource of just the Congo River, you could provide all the needs of the continent in terms of energy. That does not include the fossil fuels that are found in the Gulf of Guinea and along much of Africa today. It doesn't include the coal in South Africa and it doesn't include our wind energy resources. So the question is, how do you harness this? And I say the answer is physics. And so if you think about this and you start looking at the problem in a little bit more detail, you actually find that a big challenge is the fact that people live on limited income. And so across the world, we have 3 billion people that live on less than $2 a day. So how you produce your energy matters? And within that group, 1.6 billion people lack electricity. So the question is, how do you go about providing them with electricity? So if you look at the map of the world, this is the map of the world at night. You notice that many of the countries that have electricity at night are in the North. If you look at Africa, you see that much of Africa is dark at night. And if you look at Africa during the day, you find that a lot of the solar energy that falls on the Earth is in Africa and many parts of the developing world. And so I call this a map of possibilities. And so the question is, how do we harness this in a way that is affordable? So in our case, we've been working on relatively low cost solar cells and light emitting devices in an effort to address these kinds of problems, but working in groups, bringing in physicists, chemists, engineers to think about a future in which low cost solar cells can be processed from solutions and from simple organic materials and to have simple ideas that can create solar cells. And of course, if you run a solar cell in reverse, simple ideas that can create light emitting devices. And then by depositing these on flexible substrates, you can make flexible, drapeable solar cells. And by depositing these on glass, you make rigid solar cells in ways that you can control. And so as we got into this about 20 years ago, in some of our initial work, what we actually found was that we could work both on solar cells and on LEDs. And in the case of LEDs, of course, you have a situation where you basically take charge of two types and you interact and you basically create light of different colors. That source of the emission can be tailored to be small. And so that could become a pixel on your TV screen. And that pixel, the smaller it is, the more of a flat screen effect that you have. And so the early work we did actually ended up in OLED screens through work that was licensed by Samsung. And here's the basic idea. You can take a stamp and then you apply that stamp to a substrate with the appropriate layers. And then you can create these pixels that are shown on the right that are light emitting sources. And by applying the right amount of pressure, you can now begin to conform those surfaces around defects that exist at the interfaces. By understanding the mechanics of that contact, you can control the contacts in ways that enhance the transmission of light and charge. But if you overdo it with the pressure, you can damage the device through processes known as syncing. And so through work like this, we did early work that was subsequently licensed by Samsung in ways that showed the value of doing just this kind of efforts to guide the processing. And if you now take this work on, and this is now work that was done at AUST, what you can show is that as you apply pressure, you reduce the turn on voltages of these organic light emitting devices by about 50%. And if we go one step further and we replace the p.pss with MOO3, and you again apply pressure, you will again reduce the turn on voltages by another 50%. So with basic ideas like this, and this is work of Vitalis Agniaccio at AUST, you now begin to create the LEDs with record performance. If we look at the organic solar cells, which is where we started by basically taking bulk heterojunction structures, we went from structures with efficiencies of about 1% to efficiencies of about 10% by applying pressure to these well-controlled mixtures. And by understanding the pressure effects that are basic way, we are basically able to look at the effects of contacts due to pressure and also the induced crystallinity and chain alignment due to pressure in ways that then affect the optical and electrical properties of the solar cells. And then with basic understanding of these kind of bulk heterojunction structures and the application of pressure, we basically went from a group that had 1% efficient solar cells to solar cells with power conversion efficiencies of about 9%. Now, most recently, we've been working with perovskite-based solar cells, pressure. And we've been applying pressure again to these formamidinium iodide-based perovskite solar cells. Now, in these systems, we've once again applied pressure. And the pressure we find enhances the contacts that the interfaces in ways that enhance the behavior of these systems. And as a result of these studies, we've developed, through our African efforts, solar cells with efficiencies as high as 24.3%. The average of those, if you take some of the highest ones, have efficiencies of about 22.47 in this plot shown here. The important thing is this. These are now solar cells that we can produce. We're studying issues related to the stability of these solar cells. And we're developing these collaboratively with African scientists using the resources that have been provided to us to develop the solar cells of tomorrow. The secret to this is understanding charge transport across interfaces, understanding molecular interactions of water with surfaces, understanding diffusion phenomena, all of which are within the realm of physics. And as we develop the next generation of solar cells, we're interested in making tandem solar cells from these perovskites and building up the physics that will enable us to make, we believe, solar cells with efficiencies greater than 30% in the next year or two. This, again, is another opportunity for African scientists to get involved in areas like this where we can drive the frontiers using both theoretical physics and applied physics. And I think it's a rich area for African scientists to play. And as we think about these kinds of structures, we're going to need to deposit them on flexible solar cells, stretchable solar cells. We're going to need to develop them on flexible substrates and stretchable substrates. There's work to do there. There's also work to do to develop the next generation of batteries and supercapacitors that, again, will be on rigid substrates or flexible or stretchable substrates. Each of these areas represents great opportunities. And I'm delighted to say that we have collaborations with Hakeem Bello at the UST in both supercapacitors and batteries working with the students there. And we really look forward to having a larger African effort where we can drive the frontiers, not just in energy harnessing, but also in energy storage. Now, just before I close, I just want to say a few words about WPI and an approach that I think could be helpful to African science. So WPI was started during the Industrial Revolution, the first Industrial Revolution, and driven by the adventures of that time. And so since then, this university has grown through the Second Industrial Revolution, where we have mechanization, and the Third Industrial Revolution, where we had the Information Science Revolution, to today, which is the Internet of Things Revolution, the Information Revolution, driven by AI, machine learning, and robotics. And I think that there is a great opportunity as we evolve through these revolutions to engage scientists that can drive the frontiers in ways that create value for everyone. And so within that context, we are very open to collaborations across Africa that connect robotics to new African challenges and opportunities that can connect also to health through medical robotics and the development of the next generation of transportation systems inspired by the frontiers of knowledge and inspired by the frontiers of physics. These are all areas in which we're doing research. We're doing education. But most importantly, we're interested in harnessing these areas for a purpose that can drive development. So within that context, I'm hoping that we can think about ways of doing things in printing. We can think about ways of doing things in robotics that connects to the realities and the needs of Africa. So when COVID-19 struck, one of the things that we did was to form a COVID-19 initiative that connects to about 20 universities across Africa. First to address very basic problems, but next to think about how robotics could drive the next set of frontiers. And it struck me that even very basic things such as 3D printing, we often treat in terms of consumer behavior. We want to buy a 3D printer printed. And that's the start. But actually, the printing of recyclable materials needs serious work. And so how can we begin to go from, of course, being able to deliver PPE to protect the lives of doctors to the next frontiers that are driven by physics in ways that can detect COVID-19 and in ways that can enable, hopefully, treatments of COVID-19 in ways that are driven by science? And so we started with a group that was printing PPEs at WPI and trained a number of people at about 25 African locations to do the same. And as they did this, the group at AUSD started by printing the brackets and started to deliver these. They also started to make nose covers, N95s, and introduce the filters in ways that deliver value to those communities. And here's Shola Odusoya, who's the PI there, delivering the first set of these to the National Hospital in Abuja. And as we started to work with them, we realized that they had only limited number of ventilators and limited number of systems working. So the idea was to think about how we could be supportive of these activities in these places. So the big question is, how do you detect? And so one of our faculty, Hai Chong Zhang, developed this ultrasonic method that's enabled by robotics for the detection of COVID-19 in people. And the special thing about this is that he could use long ultrasound connected to robotics to facilitate the imaging of the plural thickening that's associated with the development of COVID-19. And then we started to integrate this with robotics methods for essentially then scanning the lungs and doing the diagnosis in ways that protective of health workers not needing to be so close under these scenarios. And basically, in the last few months, we've gone from a vision to prototyping. And the plans are that in the next month we'll be shipping the first set to the National Hospital in Abuja. We would love to do this all across Africa. And we would love to do this with hospital-based robotics. We'd love physicists to come in and really help us with ultrasonics, modeling, and imaging, and applications, and connections to robotics. And we would love to see this grow driven by theory, driven by experiments that really make a difference to the lives of people during this era of the pandemic. And then lastly is in the area of nanoparticle targeting. I've been thinking very, very deeply about the idea of really using the targeting ideas that we use for cancer to target receptors, the AY2 receptors, in ways that can lead to new therapeutics and new diagnostics. So just thinking in this way, I really think this is a great future for physics. And in my mind, this is how you understand nature. And when you understand nature, then you can control it with theory. You can control it with experiments. And you can start where you are. And in fact, I remember when we started at AUST a few years ago, people said to me, what can you do with no experiments, no labs? And I said, we have talented people. And if we work in groups, we can do things. And actually, the theory is what helped us. Actually, because if you look at our resources, we had very limited resources. But because we did a little bit of theory to guide the experiments and because we had a focus and we weren't trying to be like everybody else, we picked problems that we found interesting and we got the people together. And I hope that you can see that when you do this, at least for these areas of health and energy, you can come up with approaches that lead to outcomes. And so for example, in the area of cancer, the work that we've done is now entering into the next stage of clinical trials. And you have to go through all those processes before you can actually use these. And we have methods for imaging and we have methods for treatment. And recently, we've started thinking not only of the techniques that we've used, but new ultrasonic methods that are much cheaper that need to be guided by physics. We're thinking about new drugs that we're developing that need to be guided by physics. And the area of solar energy, we have now, for the first time, coming out of an African group, solar cells with efficiencies close to the world record. Our record of 23.4% is just a little bit behind the world record of 25.1% of perovskite solar cells. And again, it shows what you can achieve as a group driven by ideas, driven by theory in ways that can drive the next generation. Why do I speculate that we can achieve 30% solar cells? It's because I know from the theory that this is possible. How do I achieve this? It's by blending that theory to the practice in ways that we can do. And I hope that this last bit on the COVID-19 program shows you that we can do more than be consumers of products. We can take those ideas that come from the needs of society and ask the question, what is it that makes recycling of plastics difficult through printing? Do we understand that physics are printing in a way that we can model and understand and translate? And if we do, what is the impact going to be on us as a community, especially as we look at the world of the circular economy where we must begin to recycle things and reduce our dependence on just pure consumption? But most importantly is that I hope for all of you that are physicists, which much greater skills and physics that I do will really draw inspiration from these efforts and really see the opportunity across Africa to create a new generation of lions. And I'm really very proud and excited to be affiliated with the East African Institute for Fundamental Research because I think that it is through bringing together the best and the brightest across Africa into institutes like this and really building capabilities in theory that will drive the practice that will create, I hope the next generation of African lions with the EIFR as one of the engines. So with that, I wanna thank all of you and I hope that I've been able to share with you at least a vision of what is possible to leverage in physics in different ways. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Wale. Okay, there are quite a few questions from the audience so we obviously cannot go through all of them. So I'll ask maybe a few of them. So Maris and Kua from Congo asks, hello, what about using different kinds of nanoparticles such as plant virus nanoparticles? Oh, there's an opportunity to use a rich array of particles and plant virus could be some of them. I just wanted to illustrate a few examples just to give you a sense of what is possible. But I do think that there's a range of nanoparticles out there. There are other molecular recognition units out there. There are other opportunities in physics beyond what I described. And so these are only intended to be model examples. Yeah, but Prof, you do have work where nanoparticles are created using bacteria, right? Yes, we do have. I didn't talk about it. We've done work where we've synthesized nanoparticles with bacteria such as seracea, mercensis and others. We've been very successful there and I think that there's a niche opportunity to build on those kinds of efforts. We've been able to make gold nanoparticles magnetized nanoparticles and others. And that's one approach that one can take to create work that is unique in an African context, for example, and to also look at different targets. Today we focused on targeting cancer, but all these other disease cells also have different receptors that you can target. So this is kind of a general framework that you can adopt for different types of nanoparticles that are synthesized in different ways, as well as different diseases within that framework. So there's another question from Johanna Stechitel. His question is, most perovskite are lead-containing compounds which are toxic. Is there any latest development replacing these less toxic metals? There's some emerging work in strontium-containing perovskites and other non-lead-containing perovskites that looks promising. And I do think that there's a need to look at a range of these and again build on an approach. So what encouraged me the most by the way was that when our last paper was published just a few months ago, somebody wrote an article and I was very surprised. There was a lot of hooplaar about this pressure-induced effects and they said, it's nice to see serious work coming out of an African group. And I took that as a compliment. And I think the point that I'm trying to make is that we collectively as an African group want to be major drivers of science, not as individuals, but as an African group. And I do think some work of course needs to be on non-lead-containing, some work needs to be on lead-containing. We need to be careful by the way. My thinking on lead was that, oh, it's not environmentally acceptable to use lead. And then I thought about it. And I said, if we make lead perovskites with efficiencies of 30%, they will be used. There will be different things that are done to recycle them and to use them responsibly. And the key thing is to be part of the exciting science. When you drive it by the science, there's nothing special about lead. You will find different classes of other materials such as these strontium-based materials that seem to have some interesting properties that we can study. But we have to be part of the science. If you're not part of the science and you just hope to profit from the technology, you can't control it. If you are part of the science in a fundamental way, you can manipulate it, you can play with nature, and you can drive the applications in ways that are strategic. So for us, again, these lead-based systems are model systems. We're equally intrigued by a few others, but you have to be disciplined. Because if you're not disciplined, and you chase after too many things, you just find it difficult to make progress. So I would encourage groups across the continent to look at a diverse range of perovskites. I am, of course, aware of the work of Johannes Techertel, who is a good friend, and I appreciate their efforts in these areas. Can I say something? Yeah, of course. Okay, thank you, Professor. Very, very nice talk. I like it. And I am interested by the concept of diagnostic and treatment using light. You know, a few years ago, in our group here in Dakar, in collaboration with a Swedish group at Lund University, we make a first clinical trial on PDT in hospital in Senegal. And this is based on fluorescence technique, with a photosensitizer. Even you talk about it, about porphyrin, using porphyrin. But now I know that there is many, many other photosensitizers, which are not very expensive, and which could be used in photodynamic therapy. And the principle there is just to have light, light coming on the cancer cell. Yes. Absorb the photosensitizer, and you have immediately a diagnostic. You have a peak. Yes. I have it in my computer here. I don't know if you can see it. Yeah. If it is possible to see the image, so after that, the treatment came by using another kind of light, like red light, which induce a photochemical reaction, destroying the cancer cell. Yeah. And what was interesting with this system is that it's not a huge system, it's not very expensive. But our problem here in Senegal, and this is the main problem in Africa, is that you start to do something, you start to show the result, but there is absolutely no support from your university and from other place from the government. They don't care about what you are doing. Maybe you are working in the United States where people recognize really the value of science. This is not the case in most university in the African context. I can tell you that in my university, a sheikh and a job, there is no budget for research. Yeah, but Prof Wagi, you know Prof Wagi? Yes. You know Prof Wagi worked in AUST in Nigeria. You have similar problems then. Prof Wagi, I do understand what you're saying. Yeah, no, you are right. Our people here in the continent, we have many, so many young, smart people. You cannot imagine. Even talking about the COVID now in Senegal industry, people who are making shoes, now they make a screen. They recycle plastic and they make it and they sell it in the street for about two euros. You know? And there are many people who start to make masks, you know? So if there is a condition, this is why I like your talk because you want to have collaboration with other African institutions so that people can work together and we have to fight to bring our leaders, our leadership to feel that science is extremely important and that it is important to support a science initiative. So two things. So Prof Wagi, by the way, what you said on the scientific side, I have also seen similar clues in the work we're doing and I would love to talk to you about this afterwards because I know there's something there. In fact, some of the results which I didn't talk about today has shown the great promise of what you described. And so outside of this meeting, I'd love to talk to you about that. On the issue of our leaders, I want to tell you... You do it in the continent. No problem, I'm happy to do it. Now, on the issue of our leaders, I want to tell you the approach that I use. So I never look for money when I want to work on any idea first. I always just think, what can I think in my brain that I imagine I want to do? As you can see today, I'm an experimentalist but what I do first is I write the theory down because I need to make sure that there's some reason that kind of shows me that this thing is going to work. So initially I never look for money. Then the other thing I... No, I'm not saying that. Hold on, hold on. I am looking for money. No, no, hold on. Then the other thing I do is I just keep trying to talk to people who are open to talking. In my case, I was lucky. And for, I would say for 12 years, I was not very successful at doing this. But what happened was that after a while, I was introduced to some people in the World Bank. I was introduced to some people in the UN. I was introduced to some people at ICTP. I was introduced to some people who were trying to do things. And I think because they saw me trying to do things, either they felt sorry for me or they eventually appreciated that I won't go away. But they took a risk. And I have to give a lot of credit to President Obasan Joy in Nigeria who helped to build a UST. He put the $40 million down. He made it possible. And he did it only because he believed in science. But I know he was a special individual. And without him, we may not have been able to do very much. I also have to give a lot of credit to the people that have funded this work. But I think the reason they funded it is that they saw us struggling trying to do things and they saw that we were trying to do this collaboratively. And what I'm trying to say is that we are open to those collaborations with you. By the way, the reason that I got so involved in the ICTP is I saw them also trying to do things. And I saw that we were all kind of working towards this same idea of promoting physics, promoting science in the developing world, building human capacity. I agree for that. Thanks to ICTP, we was able to do all these photodynamic therapy in Senegal and thanks to the support of IPPS. You know, I understand what you are saying. Now I just want to come concerning the energy before I left the floor for other people. For energy, for example. You talk about the potential of Africa for energy. From the river Congo, we can get about 43 nuclear power stations for Africa, 43. Because we can get 43 giga, what? Energy from idle energy, only from idle energy. Concerning the solar, to me, the future of Africa is in solar energy. Solar energy, we can make possible for every African to get energy. This is possible. Sometimes I take the example of Germany, where there is almost no sun. But they are able to produce 28 gigawatt of solar energy. But, sir, I'm afraid I have to... Only Senegal, if you really want, we can produce 100. 100. Professor, I'm afraid I have to go. I have a meeting actually with our president. So I am sorry. Thanks. Thank you, Amadou. I think we should continue this discussion later. Yeah, sorry. There's one more question we need to ask. A number of people have asked questions about the stability of the Peros Castle as well. Can you tell us something about what you plan to do about the stability of the Peros Castle? Yeah. We are working on encapsulation methods that show some promise. And we have some approaches there that have been successful. We're also working on the control of interdiffusion and interfaces and understanding the degradation physics. But the encapsulation methods, which you can engineer through lamination or roll-to-roll printing, seems to have the best promise. And what we've shown is you can extend the stability from months to years through methods like that. And we think that we can extend the stability from years to decades if we continue along the track that we're following. So again, this is driven by science, but we see great opportunity to really drive the performance in the next few years. I have to go. I would love to continue this and I will try to respond to the questions. And if needed, I'm happy to do like a question and answer session if it will be helpful to the group. Do you feel that you're supposed to be able to bring some interest in Africa? I think we have to end the colloquium now. Sorry. So thanks a lot, Wole, for joining us. Thank you for taking it to everyone. And we'll see you next month. Thank you very much, Wole. Send them to us and then we'll send them to Pro. Thank you. Thank you very much. I thank you. Thanks a lot, Wole. See you later. Thank you for joining us also. So you can give your questions to us. Thank you. Thank you, thanks. Thanks.