Professor of Chemistry Paulos Yohannes, associate dean for STEM/research at Georgia State University’s Perimeter College, has been selected for the Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship (CADF).
Through the CADF, Yohannes will work with chemistry faculty at both Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia and at Georgia State to help identify and analyze key healing ingredients in medicinal plants native to Ethiopia.
The Carnegie fellowship, a first for Georgia State, matches an African-born professor with an African university to collaborate on projects that will enhance research and teaching in Africa.
As part of the fellowship, Addis Ababa University will be sending medicinal plants with active ingredients of less than 500 milligrams to Georgia State’s Chemistry Department for spectroscopic analysis and toxicity testing. Yohannes will work with Binghe Wang, a Regents’ Professor of Chemistry at Georgia State and a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Drug Discovery, on the spectroscopic analysis of plants sent to the university.
“In Ethiopia, they have a lot of medicinal plants that have been used for centuries,” said Yohannes, who grew up in the region. Isolating specific ingredients in the plants may eventually enable chemists to synthesize the active compounds for wider pharmaceutical use, Yohannes said.
“Chemists in that country have been able to extract the active ingredient in those plants, but they don’t have the heavy-duty instrumentation to analyze them. We’ll be able to do that with our analytical tools at Georgia State,” he said.
As part of his fellowship, Yohannes also is working with faculty at Addis Ababa University to create a graduate chemistry course — Metals in Medicine. He is developing the curriculum for the class.
Yohannes’ doctoral and post-doctoral research includes the development and use of metal ions in medicine.
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