TURKANA UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LAUNCHES ADULT AND CONTINUING EDUCATION CLASSES
Turkana university has identified basic literacy programmes as a key Community Social Responsibility (CSR) endeavor. Research has pointed out the low level of literacy in the community.
DONATION OF FOOD AND INSPECTION OF A BOREHOLE
TUC partners, Ramgarhia Youth Association,(RYA), Khalsa Aid International UK in conjunction with The Sikh Community in Kenya on 29th May 2021 inspected a borehole sunk at Canaan IDP camp in Turkana County
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TURKANA UNIVERSITY SIGNS RECOGNITION AGREEMENT WITH STAFF UNIONS
On an occasion witnessed by the Chairman of Council, Dr. Solomon Muchina, Turkana University College (TUC) Management signed the Recognition Agreements with the three staff unions. They included the Universities Academic Staff Union (UASU), Kenya Universities Staff Union (KUSU), and Kenya Union of Domestic, Hotels, Educational Institutions, Hospitals, and Allied Workers (KUDHEIHA).
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MMUST Chancellor Dr. Peter Muthoka and The Principal Secretary State Department of University Education & Research, Amb. Simon Nabukwesi visits Turkana University College. Read More….Chancellor & PS visit
Thematic Talk on Sexual Harassment at the Work Place and the General Interpretation of Sexual Offenses.
Turkana University College hosted a Thematic Talk on “Sexual Harassment at the Work Place and the General Interpretation of Sexual Offenses.” The Speaker was Mr. Shadrack Muyesu, a practicing Advocate of the High Court of Kenya who also serves as the University’s Legal Officer. Amongst those who attended this very interactive highly successful session were the Principal, the Deans of the various schools, students as well as a host of other teaching and non-teaching staff.
The law on sexual relations remains a hazy concept for most Kenyans. And while some may cite a number of sexual offenses, very few are aware of the exact content of each. This leaves them susceptible to sexual predators on one hand and potential guilt for crimes that could have been avoided. At what point does harmless fun translate to a crime? It’s a critical question that deserves an answer.
Turkana University College in a $ 2.7 million grant research project that explores the impact of climate change on life and evolution
A Turkana University College professor will lead a team of international experts in tectonics, sedimentology, geochronology, isotope geochemistry, paleoecology, climate modeling, and paleontology in a $ 2.7 million four- year ground-breaking project that seeks to understand how climate change and tectonics influenced life and evolution.
Professor Isaiah Nengo, a Turkana University College adjunct professor and the Principal Investigator, and Professor of Anthropology and Associate Director of Stony Brook University’s Turkana Basin Institute (TBI) will collaborate with Stony Brook Geosciences Professors and co-investigators Gregory Henkes and William Holt, along with the international team.
Professor Nengo is a Nairobi- born paleontologist, a Fulbright Scholar recipient, and a National Geographic explorer. His research focuses on understanding the nature of interactions between large-scale changes in landscape and climate and their impact in Africa during the Miocene that is the period from about 23 million years ago to five million years ago.
The project named the Turkana Miocene project has been awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Frontier Research in Earth Sciences (FRES) Program. To commence in January 2021, the project will be based at five core universities including Stony Brook University, Rutgers University, Hamilton College, the University of Michigan, and the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University (Lamont).
The researchers will explore relationships between tectonics, climate, and mammal evolution in the Turkana Basin using integrated field, laboratory, and modeling studies.
“The goal is to better define through fieldwork, laboratory analysis, and climate modeling how tectonics and climate interacted to shape the environment that gave rise to the ancestors of humans and our closest living relatives, the chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangs that emerged in Africa.
“A longstanding question at the intersection of Earth and Life Sciences is: What roles, if any, do climate and tectonics play in the evolution of life? The East African Rift is among the best places to study the influences of Earth processes on the evolution of mammals,” explains professor Nengo.
“Here, uniquely, the region’s geologic and climate histories, including the formation of the rift system that is the cradle of humankind, are preserved in sedimentary rocks. Our collaborative work will tease out how tectonics and climate come together to drive evolution,” he added.
The research team will tackle a task not done before by investigating the basin’s sediments, and the fossils they contain, to gain insight into ancient climate and habitats that record the emergence of humans, their primate ancestors, and African mammals over the last 25 million years.
A 17 million-year-old whale fossil discovered in the 1970s is the impetus for new research by an international team led by Stony Brook University that takes a unique approach to uncover the course of mammalian evolution in East Africa.
The whale fossil represents a massive change from the Miocene to today in Kenya’s Turkana Basin, as the fossil of this sea animal was originally found 740 miles inland and 620 meters in elevation – an indication perhaps of a transformed geological and ecological landscape with the open-ended question: Why was the whale there?
That is one of the questions the Stony Brook University-led international team will seek to answer when it launches the new, first-of-its-kind project in January 2021. The aim is to understand how climate change and tectonics on Miocene ecosystems in this region influenced life and evolution, from the whale to now.
It is estimated that the human-chimpanzee common ancestor evolved approximately 7.5 million years ago (mya) and diverged from the common ancestor with the gorilla ancestor about 9.3 mya. Meanwhile, the common ancestor of the great apes and humans is estimated to have diverged from the ancestor of the gibbons and siamangs approximately 19.1 mya. All these key divergence events would have occurred in the time period known as the Miocene (from about 23 mya to 5 mya).
New and existing data will be combined to study the links between rift development, climate change, and their respective roles in vegetation and mammal evolution.
Years one and two will consist of data collection from the field. The third year will involve laboratory analyses. In the fourth year, the team will conduct the analysis and be on site at TBI to produce a tectonic model that reconstructs rift evolution in this region of East Africa over the past 25 million years or Miocene period.
That tectonic model will be integrated with climate-vegetation models of equal or better resolution. Independent geological, geochemical, paleoecological, and paleontological data will be used to validate these model outputs to distinguish the influences of tectonics and climate on the evolution of Turkana ecosystems and mammals.
“This integrated approach across geoscience sub disciplines is really the future of paleo environmental reconstruction,” adds Gregory Henkes, PhD, Assistant Professor in the Department of Geosciences at Stony Brook University. “The challenge of separating commingled effects of climate, tectonics, and evolution is incredibly complex. We hope to leverage the best of these different approaches to demonstrate that its possible, at least at the scale of a single, very important basin.”
International collaborators include team members based at the National Museums of Kenya and University of Helsinki, Finland.
NSF’s FRES also provides funding to complete extensive fieldwork that will provide training for a cohort of students and postdocs at Stony Brook University, Lamont, Rutgers, Michigan, Hamilton College, and Turkana University College.
Turkana University College in collaboration with Turkana Basin Institute, in March 2019 announced its plans to roll out a human evolutionary biology master’s degree programme, the first in a university in Kenya.
The project involves four existing members of Interdepartmental Doctoral in Anthropological Sciences (IDPAS) at Stony Brook and the incoming Presidential TBI hire in E&E, Tara Smiley.