Associate Professor Emmanuel Frimpong has been named a Carnegie African Diaspora Fellow. The scholar program supports 100 short-term faculty fellowships for African-born individuals living in the United States or Canada and working in higher education.

Frimpong’s work in the Department of Fish and Wildlife Conservation focuses on the ecology, life history, and distribution of freshwater fish with an emphasis on applications in aquaculture and the conservation of fish and fisheries. He has created a comprehensive database of more than 100 biological traits of 809 U.S. freshwater fish species and worked with the on-campus library to make the database available online to scientists across the country.

The fellowship is “validation of what I have worked very hard to accomplish — to be a significant contributor to research and development in Ghana and sub-Saharan Africa,” Frimpong said. He will spend time in his home country of Ghana collaborating with the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology to develop aquaculture, fisheries, and water resources management curricula and to conduct research on aquaculture development for food security and the conservation of fish and fisheries.

“With three months in Ghana, I hope to have more time to see problems up close and contribute my expertise substantively to the solutions,” he said. “Finding ways to solve immediate problems of humanity with the scientific knowledge and tools we have now motivates me. If the people of sub-Saharan Africa can be taught to manage their natural resources well, they will have the resources they need now and for future generations.”