Segenet Kelemu

Segenet Kelemu was born in 1957 in Finote Selam, a small town in the highlands of Ethiopia. Her family farmed. The expectation for girls was marriage in their early teens, and she has described refusing it and being regarded as a difficult child. She was the first woman from her district to go to university, and she chose plant sciences at Addis Ababa because she had watched crops fail and people go hungry.

Postgraduate study took her to Montana and then Kansas, where she completed a doctorate in plant pathology, followed by a post at Cornell. In 1992 she moved to Colombia, to the International Center for Tropical Agriculture in Cali, and stayed for fifteen years working on the diseases of tropical forage grasses, the kind of unglamorous plant science that matters enormously to livestock farmers and almost nobody else.

The turning point was a decision to go home. In 2007 she took charge of the Biosciences eastern and central Africa hub in Nairobi, arguing that African scientists should be doing African research. In 2013 she became Director General of the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology, also in Nairobi, running a large institution that works on everything from malaria mosquitoes to insects as food.

She won the L'Oréal-UNESCO award for women in science in 2014. She still talks about the farm.