Catherine Nakalembe

So I applied to do a master's.

And I ended up going to the Johns Hopkins University where I did geography and environment engineering.

It's a long story, but I didn't get the opportunity to sort of do what I'd hoped that I would do, getting a degree and then being able to apply it to a problem back home.

Then I discovered the department at the University of Maryland, and I had a chat with my PhD advisor, and he was like, how would you like to go do fieldwork in Uganda?

I was like, what?

So he worked on agriculture.

That was his main domain.

I never actually considered like crop science, et cetera.

I was always like forest because of my previous experience.

But then on, I was like, all right, this is it.

Fast forward, I had the opportunity to not only do fieldwork back home.

It got me to be able to learn how things actually work because I spent a lot of time in the field.

Data is the new oil.

There's a lot of investment in data infrastructure, a lot of investment in methods, a lot of publications.

It seems really exciting.

It seems like we're breaking a lot of boundaries, a lot of barriers.

But in reality, if you were to visit my sister, who has a farm and is trying to grow maize,

None of what I do has anything to do with what she has to do.

I could do my very best analysis for her, but it's disconnected from the resources that she has access to.

So it does not tell her where the fertilizer is, where the seeds are, when to really plant in reality.