Topics: Awards, Teachers College, Research, Faculty

February 25, 2021

Winnie MucherahBall State University’s Dr. Winnie Mucherah has once again earned a fellowship through the Institute of International Education (IIE) and its Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship Program.

Mucherah, a professor of Developmental Psychology for Ball State’s Teachers College, was also selected as a Carnegie African Diaspora Fellow in 2015 and 2018. She is planning on traveling to Kenya from May 20 to August 10 to work alongside Daystar University’s Dr. Leah Komen. Mucherah’s travels will be dependent on the conditions surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic.

While in Kenya, Mucherah will partner with Komen to host workshops to strengthen the capacity-responsive research skills of junior faculty members and students through active joint research opportunities. They’ll also mentor graduate students in writing and successfully completing theses and dissertations and preparing quality papers and proposals for conferences and publication in peer-reviewed journals.

Furthermore, this project will provide opportunities for collaborative research engagement for North American scholars and Daystar University, and is also an opportunity to establish programs of inquiry to study children’s development in culturally-relevant contexts.

The Daystar University endeavor is one of 56 projects that will pair African Diaspora scholars with higher education institutions and collaborators in Africa to work together on curriculum co-development, collaborative research, graduate training, and mentoring activities in the coming months.

The Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship Program is designed to reverse Africa’s brain drain, strengthen capacity at the host institutions, and develop long-term, mutually-beneficial collaborations between universities in Africa and the United States and Canada. It is funded by Carnegie Corporation of New York and managed by the Institute of International Education in collaboration with United States International University-Africa (USIU-Africa) in Nairobi, Kenya, which coordinates the activities of the Advisory Council.

A total of 527 African Diaspora Fellowships have now been awarded for scholars to travel to Africa since the program’s inception in 2013. Fellowships match host universities with African-born scholars and cover the expenses for project visits of between 14 and 90 days, including transportation, a daily stipend, and the cost of obtaining visas and health insurance.

Mucherah has been at Ball State since 2000. Her research interests include classroom climate, self-concept and academic achievement, and reading motivation among middle school students. She has earned national recognition for her cross-cultural research in motivation and academic achievement, primarily among Kenyan adolescents. She has forged several research collaborations with universities in Kenya, serving as a Fellow for the Center for International Development for her work in Sub-Saharan Africa.

For more information on the Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship Program, contact AfricanDiaspora@iie.org.