Building Scientific Capacity in Africa: Artemis Koumoundourou's Story with TReND
August 19, 2024
TReND (Teaching and Research in Natural Sciences for Development in Africa) is a non-profit organization supporting scientific capacity-building across Africa. They run cutting-edge biomedical training courses and work with African researchers to advance their research goals by sharing tools, equipment, and expertise. We talk with Artemis Koumoundourou, a Postdoctoral Researcher in the laboratory of Joris de Wit at the VIB-KU Leuven Center for Brain & Disease Research and Executive Director at TReND, to find out more about how she got into it, what they've been working on, and how researchers can get involved.
Hi, Artemis! Tell us the story behind you getting involved with TReND.
I met the founder of TReND – Professor Tom Baden – during my Master's in Cellular & Molecular Neuroscience at the University of Tübingen in Germany. I'm generally rather cautious about getting involved with NGOs, but I became convinced that TReND was doing transparent and meaningful work, and I eventually applied to volunteer with them. I started by volunteering in the back office. I was still early on in my career at that point and wanted to gain more experience before volunteering in Africa itself, in order to provide training that was useful and relevant to their specific needs and contexts.
Soon after joining the organization, I became the Alumni Coordinator. My role was to stay in touch with all of the researchers who have participated in TReND over the years: to find out how their careers are going, learn about their current needs, and ask if there is any way we can offer support. With over 1000 alumni having graduated from TReND programs since its inception in 2011, keeping contact with everyone is impossible, but we try our best to continue mentoring as many as we can.
Through this role, I began to understand the unique challenges faced by researchers in Africa that Western researchers don't often face. For example, I'd never thought about the fact that energy is rationed in some countries, and how the absence of backup power generators would affect longer experiments.
As I started to gain confidence in my volunteer role, I began creating my own training programs. It was Covid at that time, so I started teaching coding because it's a research skill that is still transferable through a computer screen. I ended up pulling together a team to provide an online Python course. This initiative led to the project I've been working on lately...
Can you tell us more about it?
Absolutely! I just came back from the Computational Neuroscience and Machine Learning summer school that I organize and teach in, which has been my main focus at TReND lately. The aim of the course is to help establish the fields of computational neuroscience and machine learning in Africa, and to support a new generation of African researchers in addressing challenges unique to the continent. Our end goal is to create a network of African researchers that catalyzes sustainable development and fosters a truly global and inclusive scientific community in Computational Neuroscience.
Leading up to the annual program, there is a rigorous selection process: we receive over 1000 applications from across Africa, and narrow it down to 20 researchers who ultimately attend the summer school. The summer school takes place in a different African country each year – this year we were in Kigali, Rwanda. Through grants, we’re able to completely cover the travel and training expenses for all participants. We aim to not only provide both theoretical and hands-on training to students, but also to create local hubs in collaboration with host universities. We place a lot of emphasis on community-building, extending our relationship with participants once the course itself is over, to continue engagement, support, and collaboration.
.JPG "Graduates and teachers of the summer school")
You've not only been volunteering with TReND for several years at this point, but also recently became Executive Director. What's your motivation for staying so involved?
At my core, I truly believe it is a benefit to both science and society to make research more inclusive and accessible for all. It has been well documented that the majority of medical machinery has been designed for the white male body, often with dangerous repercussions for female bodies and people of color. For instance, pulse oximeters may be less accurate for black people, which can, and have, lead to unnecessary deaths. Another example is electroencephalogram (EEG) electrodes, which typically don't work as well with coarse, curly hair, excluding a large number of people from neuroscientific research. Even on a fundamental research level, a lot of the cell lines we use come from white male bodies. (Editor's Note: see this article, published in Nature, for more on racial and phenotypic bias in human neuroscience methods.)
As a researcher, I can feel angry and get into hours-long discussions about this, but at the end of the day, I want to continue finding ways to tangibly contribute towards gradually transforming the research landscape. I want to work towards the vision of academia – and society, by extension – I wish to see a few years down the line. Our approach to tackling these medical and research inequalities is through capacity building, with the intention that researchers in Africa will use the methods and resources we help equip them with to address their own specific scientific and societal problems that we simply cannot apprehend.
How do you navigate being a full-time researcher alongside your responsibilities at TReND?
Volunteering with TReND was a struggle during my PhD. My supervisor at the time wasn't entirely on board, so everything had to be done during my vacation time. When I applied to work as a postdoctoral researcher here in the de Wit lab, I was very straightforward about the extent of my involvement at TReND – I consider it a non-negotiable "package deal". Joris [de Wit] was super supportive. I think a supportive work environment is key to cushioning the stress that comes with working on such a large-scale initiative. The same thing can be said for the brilliant team at TReND: I couldn't sustain this without them!
It's definitely not easy to juggle the two, but for me, it's so worth it. On a professional level, I've gained an incredible network. I've become a better teacher. I've developed massively in skills such as leadership, organization, project management, logistics, and fundraising. On a personal level, it can also be really fun – and the close friendships I've gotten out of it are invaluable. I also enjoy feeling part of something impactful.
How can people get involved?
There are many ways researchers can get involved. Researchers who want to teach in Africa for one or two weeks can apply as volunteers, and we will match them to a university that would really benefit from their specific expertise. If you can't make it to Africa in person, you can always support from afar by offering online lectures or courses.
Universities and research institutions can also support TReND in several ways. They can take part in our equipment donation program, offer stipends to PhD students and postdoctoral fellows to travel to Africa with us and facilitate internships or thesis projects in collaboration with TReND. Finally, we are always on the lookout for potential collaborations between labs – for example, we recently equipped a lab in Nigeria who are studying cervical cancer in females and brought them in contact with a lab studying something similar in the UK.
Read more about all the TReND initiatives at trendinafrica.orgWant more? Check out IPBO, a VIB team with a mission to promote advances in agriculture and improve collaboration between African and Belgian organizations.Want to be kept up-to-date on our biotechnological news and stories? Join our community and subscribe to our bi-monthly newsletter.
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