Willie Davison Ganda is the Director for Research Development and Innovation in the Zimbabwe Ministry of Higher and Tertiary Education’s Department of Science and Technology Development.
Despite many urgent and competing demands for limited financial resources, Ganda successfully convinced government and industry stakeholders that their investment in and support of advanced cyberinfrastructure would yield long-range benefits for Zimbabwean citizens. He proposed a high performance computing (HPC) initiative that was accepted as an official government program in 2012, and was appointed project director.
Zimbabwe Center for HPC 2014 dedication
Ganda manages the HPC human capacity development program for technical personnel at Zimbabwe’s state universities, and leads an outreach program that builds science diplomacy among centers in the SADC region and around the world. He plans to acquire more HPC in the future, and advise other centers in the development of sustainable funding structures that support hardware replacement and workforce development.
My dream of a full-fledged HPC center was realized in February, 2014 when our new supercomputer center was dedicated. It’s already supporting critical genomics, HIV/Aids variant research, weather data analysis, and climate forecasting. Our facility and the shared cyberinfrastructure will help Zimbabwean and SADC researchers focus on the grand economic and scientific challenges in public health, agriculture, energy, water, and climate that are especially problematic in our region,” said Ganda.
Ganda holds a master of philosophy in engineering for sustainable development degree from Cambridge University in the United Kingdom, a master of business administration from Heriot Watt University in the UK, a master of engineering in manufacturing systems and operations management, and a bachelor of engineering (with honors) degree in industrial & manufacturing engineering from the National University of Science and Technology in Zimbabwe.
