Romain Lucas Glele Kakaï

Biography

Mr Romain Lucas Glèlè Kakaï is a Full Professor of Biostatistics, Head of the Laboratory of Biomathematics and Forest estimations (www.labef-uac.org), Coordinator of the Master and doctoral Programmes in Biostatistics at the University of Abomey-Calavi (Republic of Benin). He is also chair of the scientific council of agronomic sciences at his university. He obtained a Bachelor in Agronomy (ranking first) in 1998, an engineer degree in Forestry in 2000 (ranking first), a Master in Applied statistics (ranking First) and a PhD in Biometry at the Gembloux agricultural university (Belgium) in 2001 and 2005 respectively. He received the “Biometrie 88” prize in Belgium in 2002 for his Master’s research work, awarded by the French Belgian biometricians association and the “Jan Tinbergen” prize for his PhD research work, awarded by the International Statistical Institute (ISI) in 2005. He has been a postdoctoral fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany in 2007 and worked on the multi-group discriminant analysis. He has also been a young affiliate of The World Academy of Sciences (TWAS, 2011-2015), a member of the Global Young Academy (GYA, 2013-2018), Member of the young scientific community of the World Economic Forum (2012-). He is currently the Chair of the African-German Network of Excellence in Science (AGNES), supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (AvH) and the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). Since 2017, he has been appointed a member of the international selection committee of the International Climate Protection Fellowship Programme of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. In 2014, he created the Master’s and PhD programmes in Biostatistics at the University of Abomey-Calavi to support the training of African scholars in this field. Since its creation, this programme, taught in English, has welcomed students from 20 African countries (Burkina-Faso, Burundi, Chad, Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Gabon, Ghana, Guinea Conakry, Liberia, Malawi, Mali, Namibia, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Niger, Senegal, South-Sudan, Togo, Cameroon, Uganda). He is also a regular visiting Professor in Biostatistics and gives every year courses in statistics at Kwame Nkrumah University of Sciences and Technology (KNUST, Ghana), the University of Lomé and the University of Kara (Togo), Felix Houphouët Boigny University (Cote d’Ivoire). He also gave courses at Abdou Moumouni University (Niger) and the University of Masuku (Gabon). His current research interests are i) Infectious disease modeling, (ii) Artificial intelligence and Machine learning based problem-solving in Agriculture, Linear and generalized linear and non-linear mixed models; iii) forest dynamics modeling. These research activities yield so far (2022), 245 scientific papers in international journals, 4 books in statistics and many edited communications. His H-index=35 with 3720 (Scholar.Google, April 10, 2022).

Awards