“Oh my God, I didn’t dream to have a good opportunity like this,” says Esra Khaleel, a physics student from the conflict-plagued region of Darfur in the Sudan. Last year Khaleel left a nonpaying national service position at the Sudan Atomic Energy Commission to attend the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) outside of Cape Town, South Africa, which runs a graduate-level education program and paid all of her travel and study expenses. Khaleel is now completing research on the structure of nuclei in high spin states with the physics department at the University of Cape Town and the iThemba Laboratory for Accelerator Based Sciences, a national facility near Cape Town that houses a 200-MeV cyclotron and a 5-MeV van de Graaff electrostatic accelerator.
Since AIMS was founded in 2003 by University of Cambridge cosmologist Neil Turok, 160 students from more than 30 African countries have graduated from its...
