A renowned Nigerian geologist, Professor Nuhu George Obaje, has been appointed pioneer head of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) professorial chair at Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida University. Lapai (IBBUL), in Niger state.
Obaje, who is the director of Central Research Centre (CRC) at IBBUL, was jointly appointed by NNPC and the school management recently.
The endowment contract, signed between the university and the corporation, states that the chair endowment will be for a tenure of five years, while the affairs of the chair will be managed by a ‘strategic management committee’ comprising personnel of IBBUL and NNPC.
Obaje who was born on December 15, 1961, at Ajaka village in Igalamela local government area of Kogi state, attended Barewa College Zaria, from 1974 to 1979. He then proceeded to the Ahmadu Bello University (ABU) Zaria, where he studied Geology and graduated with B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in 1984 and 1987 respectively. In 1994, he bagged his PhD from the University of Tuebingen in Germany.
Among other scholarly achievements and honours, the IBBUL don was a recipient of the Royal Society of London (RSL) post-doctoral fellowship in Petroleum Geochemistry at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, in 1997; the German Academic Exchange Service (GAES) postdoctoral fellowship in biostratigraphy at the University of Tuebingen, in 1998; and the Alexander von Humboldt research fellowship in organic geochemistry/organic petrology at the Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources in Hannover/Germany, on two separate occasions.
He is an Assessor of the Petroleum Technology Development Fund (PTDF) annual research grants competition programme, and resource person in the Peer Review of the PTDF Professorial Chair Endowment programme. Obaje, is also a Senior Research Fellow of the Alfried Krupp Foundation.
