Two Nigerians in US Civil Service win White House praise

Temilola Fatoyinbo-Agueh  Two US-based Nigerians employed by the American government are shining brightly in their different endeavours in the United States and are receiving US presidential recognitions, Empowered Newswire reports. Both Mr. Abel Alagbe, a University of Ibadan graduate who works at the US Department of Agriculture and Mrs Temilola Fatoyinbo-Agueh of the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA, are being honored with different presidential awards. While Alagbe is receiving the US Presidential Volunteer Service Awards and Call to Service Award, Fatoyinbo-Agueh was honored as one of the top US early scientist recognised by White House in 2011. These recognitions came on the heels of many Nigerian students in the US who topped their class and schools as American universities held graduation ceremonies earlier that year. Another Nigerian student, Jekwu Anyaebuna, a graduate of University of Ilorin also won the Commonwealth African region Arts prize earlier that year. Alagbe, a 1986 graduate from the Faculty of Technology from the University of Ibadan and a holder of a Master’s Degree from the New York University Polytechnic in New York, is employed by the US government in the US federal agriculture department and works in the Food Safety Inspection Services unit, FSIS.  Alagbe was honored at the US capital city of Washington DC at an event where the US Agriculture Secretary, Tom Vilsack, presented the awards, in the presence of US government agency heads, members of Congress and other honoured guests. Ms. Temilola Fatoyinbo-Agueh, on her own, was named by the White House among the 96 Distinguished Early Science award winners. According to White House and NASA statements, “Fatoyinbo-Agueh, an environmental scientist at NASA Goddard, was recognised for exceptional achievement in merging scientific priorities with advanced technology to develop innovative remote-sensing instrumentation for carbon-cycle and ecosystems science. NASA said some of her research brought her to the African coastlines to test a new satellite technique for measuring the area, height, and biomass of mangrove forests. She used data from the Landsat satellite, NASA's Shuttle Radar Topography Mission and IceSat satellite along with a remote sensing software-based classification method, and created with a colleague, three new kinds of maps of mangroves: continental maps of how much land the mangroves cover; a three-dimensional map of the height of forest canopies across the continent; and biomass maps that allow researchers to assess how much carbon the forests store.

Courtesy diasporacommitee.com