Maniru Ibrahim – The Nigerian Mathematics Genius Who bagged €20m Scholarship To Study At Ireland’s Science Centre

Maniru Ibrahim is a mathematics genius who was awarded a scholarship worth over €20 million by the Science Foundation Ireland Centre for Research Training in the Foundation of Data Science.

Maniru Ibrahim is a first-class graduate of mathematics from the Northern institution of Usman Danfodiyo University, Sokoto. He graduated in 2017. He was able to get the scholarship award for his Ph.D. program. Ibrahim was also given a yearly allowance of €18,500, for the duration of his four-year program. The scholarship fund is inclusive of travel and accommodation allowances for conferences in tandem with his studies.

Maniru Ibrahim is a native of Sokoto. He had his primary, secondary, and university education all in the Northern State before fulfilling his Youth Service Program at Zamfara.

Before his successful breakthrough in 2021, Maniru Ibrahim mentioned that the rejections he faced while seeking to make ends meet left him dampened. Just before the success in Ireland, Ibrahim was rounding off his Masters program in Theoretical Physics in Italy. He was part of three Nigerians who were shortlisted for the program. In Ireland, he is a Ph.D. student at Limerick University, Ireland.

Maniru Ibrahim is the first African to be invited to join the Science Foundation Ireland Centre for Research Training in the Foundation of Data Science. In an interview, Maniru said he was surprised he was picked for the program after he was rejected by other schools 20 times. “At first I was a bit discouraged and frustrated, but when I saw this scholarship, I just decided to give it a trial, and gratefully, I made it.”

The Science Foundation Ireland Centre for Research Training in the Foundation of Data Science is out to train a cohort of 130+ Ph.D. students in a large-scale collaborative initiative between the University of Limerick (UL), Maynooth University (MU), and University College Dublin (UCD).

At the moment, Maniru Ibrahim is studying a fluid dynamics problem. “When you take a medicine tablet, you know that it dissolves in the body after a certain time. The object of my studies is exactly this one: how does it dissolve? What time does it take to complete the process?”