ENCOUNTER!

Meet YUSUF ABUDULRAHMAM SAMBO: Nigerian born British Genius leading 5G Revolution in Scotland…heads University of Glasgow’s World Technological Research

*Kaduna native-an indigene of Ikara completed Ph.D degree in Mobile Communications at the age of 27 years

*Had Master’s degree in Mobile and Satellite Communications at the University of Surrey in distinction with two publications

*Graduated from Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, with a second-class upper degree in Electrical Engineering

*Contracted to conduct research on mobile communications at the Texas A&M

*Presently working on a £1.2 million EPSRC-funded project as a research associate in Communication, Sensing and Imaging Group of the University of Glasgow

*Nicola Sturgeon, the first woman to become the first minister of Scotland: “Scotland is aiming to be the 5G leader in the United Kingdom. 5G could enable Scotland to add about £17 billion to GDP by 2035 and create 160,000 jobs”

BY GEORGE ELIJAH OTUMU/AMERICAN Foreign Bureau Chief

ENCOUNTER!

Meet YUSUF ABUDULRAHMAM SAMBO: Nigerian born British Genius leading 5G Revolution in Scotland…heads University of Glasgow’s World Technological Research

*Kaduna native-an indigene of Ikara completed Ph.D degree in Mobile Communications at the age of 27 years

*Had Master’s degree in Mobile and Satellite Communications at the University of Surrey in distinction with two publications

*Graduated from Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, with a second-class upper degree in Electrical Engineering

*Contracted to conduct research on mobile communications at the Texas A&M

*Presently working on a £1.2 million EPSRC-funded project as a research associate in Communication, Sensing and Imaging Group of the University of Glasgow

*Nicola Sturgeon, the first woman to become the first minister of Scotland: “Scotland is aiming to be the 5G leader in the United Kingdom. 5G could enable Scotland to add about £17 billion to GDP by 2035 and create 160,000 jobs”

BY GEORGE ELIJAH OTUMU/AMERICAN Foreign Bureau Chief

YUSUF SAMBO is a story of success. From United Kingdom to United States, Asia, United Arab Emirates to Africa; this Kaduna born technology genius has become a familiar face. He is presently leading 5G revolution in Scotland. At the age of 27 years, this highly talented British Citizen who just turned 32 is now one of the most sought after information technology specialist around the world. Without doubt, Yusuf is a leading intellectual taking 5G revolution to the highest level in the world.

Sharing similar view, Nicola Sturgeon, the first woman to become the first minister of Scotland, said the Scotland is aiming to be the 5G leader in the United Kingdom, claiming 5G could enable Scotland add about £17 billion to GDP by 2035 and create 160,000 jobs.

Yusuf is a research associate and the 5G-SON (self-organised network) testbed lead at the University of Glasgow, UK. The building blocks of his sterling career were laid at Command Children School, Abuja, where he had his primary education, and Zaria Academy, Shika, where he learnt at the secondary education level. He would go on to Ahmadu Bello University (ABU) Zaria, where he graduated in 2010 with a second-class upper degree in electrical engineering.

By 2011, a year after graduating from ABU, Sambo already completed his Master’s degree in Mobile and Satellite Communications at the University of Surrey in distinction with two publications

Yusuf born in 1988 in Kaduna, an indigene of Ikara local government, Kaduna state had parents that are medical doctors who remains his role model. Without doubt, his passion for Information Technology was encouraged by his father, a highly educated man who introduced him to the power of information and communications technology at a very young age. Yusuf says his father,a medical doctor by training, proofreads all his tech papers, showed interest in all is research and academic works.

Following a distinct result during his masters at Surrey, Yusuf got a full Ph.D. scholarship to work on a European Union-funded project on designing low electromagnetic emission future networks. He took the offer and started the Ph.D.

But like everything with the golden fish, there is no hiding place; during his first year of Ph.D., he secured a mobility funding, to conduct research on mobile communications at the Texas A&M University in Qatar.

At the age of 27, he completed his Ph.D. in Mobile Communications from the 5G Innovation Centre, reputed as the world’s largest academic research centre dedicated to next-generation mobile and wireless connectivity, at the University of Surrey in 2016.

Sambo has since tapped into the centre’s vision to drive the fourth industrial revolution “to enable a world where everything is provided wirelessly to the end device by a fixed and mobile (converged) infrastructure that functions across the whole geography”.

Despite being able to thrive anywhere in the world, Yusuf returned to Nigeria upon graduation from Surrey, to transfer knowledge and give back to the Nigerian system. He worked briefly as a network engineer at Suburban Telecoms.

Later, he lectured at Baze University, Abuja, between July 2016 and August 2017, where he taught three modules to undergraduate students at the University, and would later become a supervisor of the Electrical Engineering Department of the tertiary institution in Nigeria’s capital.

His students made a Bluetooth controlled rover, which was demonstrated when Abdullahi Ganduje, governor of Kano state, visited the university.

While at Baze, he co-founded Baze Youth Forum, a gathering for progressive youths to share ideas on issues of common interest, when he joined Fleissen & Company, an independent research and consulting company, as a consultant and worked on several projects.

The company helps organisations to resolve complex problems in oil and gas, power, manufacturing, telecoms & technology (T&T), and water sectors.

Yusuf is currently a research associate in the Communication, Sensing and Imaging Group of the University of Glasgow working on a £1.2 million EPSRC-funded project to design autonomous and resilient emergency communication systems. Main research interests include EMF exposure reduction, radio resource management, energy efficiency, wireless sensor networks and device-to-device (D2D) communication.

Yusuf has designed and built the first real-time 5G testbed dedicated to Self-Organised Networks (SON) in the UK which runs on general-purpose processors. At Glasgow, he has also produced several proofs-of-concept and demonstrated various 5G use-cases including a prototype for the world’s first pop-up network that can be deployed in less than 2 minutes for emergency communications and rural connectivity.

His works have also made it possible to dynamically switch on/off 5G small cells by using machine learning for traffic prediction and multi-sensor fusion that result in over 20 percent energy savings.

Following his array of excellent ideas and implementation, he was awarded the coveted Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Impact Acceleration Account (IAA) grant for research on novel cooling systems capable of reducing the energy consumption of 5G networks by up to 50 percent. The 31-year-old co-edited the world’s first book on the verticals of 5G and EMF radiation from future wireless communication, published by the prestigious Wiley-IEEE and the IET in 2019.

In September 2018, the tech guru was engaged for EPSRC-IAA funded research mobility to the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China to work on 5G testbed design.

He leads the University of Glasgow research team on the widely-celebrated Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS)-funded 5G Rural First project. The project focuses on implementing a pop-up network for a healthcare use case in the Orkney Islands, Scotland.

Yusuf recently coordinated a demo for the first minister of Scotland to showcase the research and successes of his team’s 5G plan. This was widely reported in the British media, including coverage by the BBC, STV, the Scotsman, Daily Record, the Herald and the Daily Mail.

The Kaduna-born engineer currently has 21 publications in top-ranked peer-reviewed journals and conferences. He is also a reviewer for several top journals and conferences, serving on technical program and organising committees of many international conferences and workshops.

When he is not revolutionalising 5G networks, he is supporting Arsenal Football Club, playing squash or traveling. Sambo says he loves food and he is strangely a pen collector with about 100 pens from random places. Yusuf is a pride of Nigeria and Africa.

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