Civian Kiki Massa Receives International Fellowship from American Association of University Women

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The American Association of University Women (AAUW) has awarded a 2021-22 International Fellowship to Ph.D. student Civian Kiki Massa of the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department. Massa grew up in rural Cameroon, and her current research focuses on energy poverty and data mining to improve electricity provision services in Africa.

Recipients of the AAUW fellowship pursue academic work and lead innovative community projects to empower women and girls. As fellowship recipients, they receive between $18,000 and $30,000 from the AAUW, one of the world’s oldest and leading supporters of graduate women’s education. Massa is also the current recipient of $50,000 in support as a Spaulding-Smith Fellow.

Massa earned her B.S. degree in Electrical Power Systems Engineering from the African Leadership University and Glasgow Caledonian University. She now works as a graduate research assistant in ECE Assistant Professor Jay Taneja’s lab, called the Systems Towards Infrastructure Measurement and Analytics (STIMA) Lab.

Massa grew up in a rural area in Cameroon with limited access to electricity, a situation which caused her family to use kerosene tin lamps for lighting most of the time. The scarcity and cost of kerosene forced her family to spend many nights without lighting, which affected her studies because Massa could only study during the daytime.

Massa learned the basics of electricity in high school, and she realized that Cameroon had the potential to supply reliable electricity to everyone, including her village, but lacked an effective energy policy framework and infrastructure capacity.
It was then that she committed herself to understanding the challenges of the African energy sector on a deeper level with the hope of providing future solutions to the energy access disparity in rural villages in Cameroon and all of sub-Saharan Africa.

This abiding interest in Africa’s electricity issues eventually led Massa to her research with Taneja, who studies the application of computing tools to measuring and managing infrastructure in industrialized and developing regions, including energy and building systems, but also transportation, water, and sanitation systems.

Among other research projects in Taneja’s lab are studies about Electricity Growth and Use In Developing Economies and Smart Electricity Grids in Sub-Saharan Africa, which are both essential to Massa’s research.

AAUW International Fellowships have been in existence since 1917. The program provides support for women pursuing full-time graduate or postdoctoral study in the United States to women who are not U.S. citizens or permanent residents and who intend to return to their home countries to pursue professional careers.

(February 2022)