Our Ambassador of the Month — October 2019

Congratulations for being elected Ambassador of the month! Could you tell us a bit more about yourself?
I am Bashar Haruna Gulumbe,
I am From Kebbi State, Nigeria. and I hold a BSc and MSc in Microbiology. I have been teaching and mentoring undergraduate microbiology students at the Federal University Birnin Kebbi since early 2015. As part of my contract as a teaching and research assistant, I provide technical laboratory support at my institution and also carry out community service. I have published 7 peer-reviewed articles, 3 as lead author.
I attended a number of conferences both in Nigeria and UAE. I have also attended at least 20 online workshops and webinars on academic writing and molecular microbiology. In addition to the ambassador of the month award that I won recently, I also won a PhD scholarship at Swinburne University of Technology, Malaysia. I am looking forward to getting more opportunities in the future. My research interest lies at the interface of environmental microbiology, public health, antimicrobial resistance and bacterial stress response.
In what ways do you think your friends and colleagues can benefit from Researcher?
No doubt Researcher provides easy access to high quality academic journals. One thing that makes Researcher interesting is that the app is free. Continue to improve on it such that one can access all journals offline, as this will facilitate access to the journals even during field work in remote communities without internet access.
What changes would you like to see in academia?
In the last two years of my struggle to get a fully funded PhD scholarship, I understand that application fees, costs associated with standardised tests such as GRE and TOEFL are major hurdles undermining the efforts of many aspiring scholars from developing countries. Another major hurdle is the issue of subscription journals. There should not be any barrier to scholarly publications. Access to published articles should be free for particularly scholars from resource limited countries.
Thousands of academics around the world are already using Researcher to browse their favourite journals. Researcher is free to download and use on iOS, Android and at www.researcher-app.com.

