/ 15 August 2016

Dr Muthoni Masinde: Her drought prediction tool has won her several awards

Dr Muthoni Masinde
Dr Muthoni Masinde

Dr Muthoni Masinde works as a senior lecturer and head of the Information Technology Department at the Central University of Technology (CUT); her research and teaching experience at university level spans 16 years. Since she became head of department in 2013, the number of staff members enrolled for or in possession of higher degrees doubled and, through an elaborate research strategy that she developed, the department’s research output increased from two to over 15 articles a year. The department’s postgraduate enrolment increased from three to over 20 students a year, and for the first time in the history of the department, between 2014 and 2016 she recruited three doctoral students, one of whom will receive his degree in September 2016.

Masinde received her PhD from the University of Cape Town in 2012; her research was on developing a novel tool that accurately predicts droughts. The tool taps into African indigenous knowledge on natural disasters and augments it with information communication technologies (ICTs) such as artificial intelligence, wireless sensor networks, and mobile phones. This contribution was recognised by the International Telecommunication Union in its “ITU-T Focus Group Bridging the gap: From Innovation to Standards“, in which it has been incorporated as an innovation. This idea also emerged in the top five in the first ITU Green ICT Application Challenge.

Masinde’s contribution to drought forecasting solutions for the Free State was recently featured on the BBC World Service. Her drought prediction tool has also seen her emerge as the winner of the 2016 CUT Vice-Chancellor’s Staff Excellence Awards: Innovation Category. Masinde is a researcher in the area of the Internet of Things and ICT solutions for droughts, and to facilitate this research, she established the Unit for Research on Informatics for Droughts in Africa. This is the first such unit dedicated to the advancement of scientific research and development of ICTs for predicting Africa’s droughts.

She has supervised eight master’s students and is currently supervising another 12, with four due to complete their degrees by the end of 2016. She has published seven journal articles, three book chapters and 26 papers in peer-reviewed conference proceedings in the past five years.

She is also a reviewer of six journals and conference proceedings, as well as an external examiner of master’s and PhD theses for four local universities (CPUT, UCT, UJ and UWC) and two non-South African (Makerere University in Uganda and the University of Nebraska in the US) universities.

Masinde was behind the formation of CUT’s Association for Women in Engineering and Information Technology. She is also an active member of the Association of South African Women in Science and Engineering.