Undergraduate Scholarship Programme

Professor Idris A. Rai

• From Tanzania
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• Studied in Turkey/UK/France

The IsDB scholarship helped Professor. Rai to obtain his BSc in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Bogazici University, Turkey and then his MSc the same subject from nearby Bilkent University. Prof. Rai was later employed as a Research Associate at Lancaster University in the United Kingdom, where he worked as a senior researcher for three years on an Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) funded project. He then obtained his PhD in Networking and Computer Science from Telecom ParisTech, a word-class telecommunications school in Paris, France. 

Prof. Rai has gone on to serve as a regional Principal Coordinator of the Euro-Africa Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) project, a European Commission funded project aimed at promoting collaborative research on ICTs between African and European researchers. He has also served as Manager of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) Centre of Excellence at Makerere University, Uganda which was established to build capacity on the telecommunications sector in the region. 

Over recent years, Prof. Rai has gained several impressive professional achievements. He is the 2009 winner of the competitive IBM Faculty award, a 2010 Google research grant recipient, 2009 and 2010 Internet Society fellowship, and his biography appears in 2010 Marquis Who is Who in the World. He has reached the prestigious Senior Membership level of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and is a Professional Member of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM). He has appeared in the 2010 list of top 100 scholars in the world by the IBC, as among the Top 100 Educators. He has also received grants, aimed at supporting teaching, research and development activities on networking and mobile computing from CISCO, HP-UNESCO, HP and British Council.