Research by New DENIN Fellow Hanan Abou Ali Aims to Reduce Hunger in Nigeria

Hanan Abou Ali lives by the belief that we are all supposed to help each other. She hopes her Ph.D. work will help the world meet the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, especially number 2: End hunger.

Her Ph.D. research, now supported by a DENIN Fellowship, involves remote mapping and machine learning of crop growth patterns in Nigeria, with the goal of helping smallholder farmers optimize crop yield and economic return while minimizing environmental impact. The highly competitive and prestigious DENIN Fellowship offers financial support and professional development opportunities to students at UD whose Ph.D. research interests help bring science to society.

Abou Ali is collecting hundreds of thousands of satellite images and GoPro camera images of Nigerian cropland, then “teaching” computer models to classify the images by crop. She will produce maps of which crops are grown throughout the country and an open-access national database. Her Ph.D. work is done in collaboration with the Nigerian National Space Research and Development Agency (NASRDA); the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture; the University of Ibadan, Nigeria; and the NASA Harvest team in the United States.

“This work has a lot of potential to help not only Nigeria,” Abou Ali said. The method “can also be applied elsewhere in the world.”

Her doctoral advisor, Kyle Davis, in UD’s Department of Geography and Spatial Sciences and Department of Plant and Soil Sciences, had previously worked on the food system in Nigeria, which is what attracted her to work with him. Nigeria produces 25 percent of the crops grown in Africa.

Abou Ali was born and grew up in Lebanon with a cleft lip and palate, which took 14 surgeries to fix. After one surgery she couldn’t eat solid food for about a year. Her family had access to nutrition and she had liquid nutrition, but this experience left her with empathy for people who lack reliable access to food.

“I’m a firm believer in taking science to the next step,” she said. “The main reason I came to the U.S. is because of the opportunities we have here that we don’t have in Lebanon,” where there is no funding for graduate-level research. “I wanted to come here and see how I can take my science and make it an action, rather than do my research and forget about it when I graduate.”

To that end, Abou Ali led a 5-day training in March 2023 for NASRDA employees, teaching them how to gather and analyze data about crop growth around the country. Passing on her knowledge allows the work to continue in Nigeria after she graduates. She’s now planning a national campaign in which the people she trained will train others to do the same work.

Abou Ali first came to the U.S. when she was 15 with the U.S. Department of State’s Youth Exchange and Study (YES) program. She lived with a family and attended her sophomore year of high school in Wisconsin. The program began after 9/11 to open dialogue between Americans and people from countries with significant Muslim populations.

She returned to Lebanon, finished high school, and attended college at the Lebanese International University. She was the only woman in the surveying engineering program and graduated at the top of her class. That wasn’t the first or last time she found herself the only woman among men. She was bullied with her cleft lip, and this toughened her. “There was always a fire in me that said, I know what I’m capable of,” Abou Ali said.

She took one GIS course during undergrad and loved the potential of it—“you can apply it to literally any problem in the world,” she said. At the time no university in Lebanon offered a master’s in GIS, so in 2016 she applied for and received a U.S. Fulbright Fellowship to pursue a master’s degree in GIS at Idaho State University.

Abou Ali’s determination has motivated other young women. “My greatest accomplishment is when I hear other girls or women say that I inspire them,” she said. “I recently had a former student in Lebanon who applied to the Fulbright program a couple of times, and she finally got it. She called me crying and said, ‘You’re the reason that I kept pushing myself and applying again.’ Just hearing that really makes all the pain worth it.”

Kyle Davis, her doctoral advisor, confirms her selflessness. “She is incredibly generous in helping to shepherd along those seeking to follow in her footsteps,” he said.

This generosity drives Abou Ali’s extracurricular activities as well. She volunteers to tutor students who don’t have the means to pay. Through the YES Program and the Fulbright Program, she’s learned to bridge the gap between cultures, “because I believe that people fear what they don’t know,” she said. She has presented to schoolchildren, senior citizens, and everyone in between about Lebanon and Islam. “I always tell people, you’re not going to offend me if you ask me something,” Abou Ali said. “I’d rather correct you than you have a misconception. That’s always been a big part of who I am.”

by Joy Drohan, Eco-Write, LLC

Photo: Hanan Abou Ali mapping cassava fields in Oyo State, Nigeria, using a drone to supplement satellite imagery and GoPro camera data;  Credit: Kyle Davis