Friday, March 29, 2024

Prof Mabogunje gets US Academy Fellowship, French prize for Geography

Erudite scholar of Geography, popularly known as the “Father of Geography in Africa,” ProfessorAkin Mabogunje, has been elected as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Mabogunje’s election into the Academy was conveyed in a letter dated April 10, 2017 and jointly signed by the Chair of the Board, Don M. Randel and President, Jonathan F. Fanton.

The letter states that the purpose of the academy, as expressed in their 1780 Charter, is “to cultivate every art and science, which may tend to advance the interest, honour, dignity and happiness of a free, independent and virtuous people.”

It explains that the Academy carries on that tradition through studies, publications, and formal and informal meetings.

Their studies have helped to set the direction of research and analysis in science and technology, global security, social policy and the humanities.

With the election of Prof. Mabogunje into the academy, he joins the company of other notable membersfrom their founders John Adams, James Bow- doin, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington to Ralph Waldo Emerson and Alexander Graham Bell.

Other distinguished members include John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. Foreign members have included Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, John Maynard Keynes, Akira Kurosawa and Nelson Mandela.

Current members represent today’s innovative thinkers in every field and profession, including more than 200 Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winners.

Mabogunje has, therefore, been invited to participate along with other newly elected members in the 2017 Induction at the House of the Academy in Cambridge, Massachusetts in October 2017.

The letter also states that the honour signifies the high regard in which the professor of Geography is held by leaders in the field and members throughout the nation.

In April 1999, Mabogunje became the firstAfrican to be made a Foreign Associate of the United States National Academy of Sciences, Washington D.C. To further crown the lifelong achievements of this great Nigerian academic and intellectual, who celebrated his 85th birthday in October 2016, he has also been named as the Laureate of the Vautrin-Lud Prize 2017, which is regarded as the “Nobel Prize of Geography.”

The presentation of the prize will take place in Saint-Die-des-Vosges, France on September 30, 2017.

This award was communicated to him by the General Secretary of the Prize, ProfessorJean-Christophe Gay of the Nice Sophia Antipolis University, who expressed his pleasure and pride that the Jury awarded the Vautrin-Lud to Mabogunje.

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