Yusuf Sambo, Nigerian Engineer Leading Scotland’s 5G Revolution

   Yusuf Abdulrahman Sambo is a research associate and the 5G-SON (self-organised network) testbed lead at the University of Glasgow, UK. Sambo was born in 1988 in Kaduna. He hails from Ikara local government, Kaduna state. He is the son of Abdulrahman Sambo, former acting executive secretary of the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS).

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 (with distinction and two publications). Born to a medical doctor, who remains his role model, Sambo says his love for IT was encouraged by his father, who introduced him to the power of information and communications technology at a very young age.

Sambo says his father, despite being a medical doctor by training, proofreads all his tech papers, and has always been interested in all he is research and academic works. Following a distinct result during his masters at Surrey, Sambo 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”. The internet of things!

THE CABLE