| Intro | Senegalese mathematician |
| Is | Mathematician |
| From | Senegal |
| Type | Mathematics |
| Gender | female |
| Birth |
1967, Dakar, Senegal |
| Age | 54 years |
Aissa Wade (born 1967) is a Professor of Mathematics at Pennsylvania State University. She is the President of the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences.
Early life and education
Wade is from Dakar. She studied mathematics at Cheikh Anta Diop University and graduated in 1993. She had to leave Senegal to earn a PhD as there were no opportunities in Africa. Wade earned her PhD at the University of Montpellier in 1996. Her thesis, “Normalisation formelle de structures de Poisson”, considered symplectic geometry. Her doctoral advisor was Jean Paul Dufour.
Career
Wade became a postdoctoral researcher at the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics, where she worked on conformal Dirac structures. She held visiting faculty positions at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, African University of Science and Technology and Paul Sabatier University. Wade joined Pennsylvania State University and was appointed full professor in 2016.
She served as a managing editor of The African Diaspora Journal of Mathematics. She is editor of Afrika Mathematika. She is on the scientific committee of the NextEinstein forum, an initiative to connect science, society and policy in Africa. Wade is the President of the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences, and is the first woman to hold this role. She has been awarded funding from the National Science Foundation to support the Senegal Workshop on Geometric Structures. She has been involved with American Association for the Advancement of Science activities to enhance African STEM research, including the provision of evidence-based metrics, case studies and policy recommendations. In 2017 Wade was named a fellow of the African Academy of Sciences.