Ilgin Guler, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering. Credit: Penn State Engineering
Ilgin Guler named a recipient of inaugural Penn State-Ghana Seed Grant Program
The nine selected projects, including the one led by Guler, exemplify strength, impact potential of Penn State-Ghana partnership
Mar 5, 2026
Editor's note: A version of this article originally appeared on Penn State News.
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The inaugural Penn State-Ghana Research Partnerships Seed Grant Program has awarded nine projects that aim to fuel global impact, including crop disease surveillance, removing heavy metals from mining wastewater and understanding multimodal traffic streams.
Ilgin Guler, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, is the Penn State investigator on the project “Investigating interactions among multimodal traffic streams.” The Ghana collaborators on the project are: Williams Ackaah, principal research scientist and associate professor of transport studies, CSIR-Ghana; Emmanuella Adubea Asamoah, assistant research scientist, CSIR-Ghana; Frank Junior Effah, technical officer, CSIR-Ghana
The program is designed to foster new and sustainable research collaborations between faculty at Penn State and faculty/researchers at Ghanaian research institutions or to strengthen existing ones. The initiative aims to catalyze innovative, interdisciplinary projects that address shared scientific and societal challenges while laying the foundation for future collaborative external funding.
Camelia Kantor, associate director of the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences, and Marian Dorcas Quain, deputy director-general of Ghana’s Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), both fellows for the National Academie’s U.S.-Africa Frontiers of Science, Engineering, and Medicine program, launched the program at the inaugural Penn State and Ghana Symposium: The Power of Partnership, in October of last year.
The symposium brought researchers together to learn from each other, make connections and explore opportunities for additional collaborations, including the seed grant program.
Funding for the Penn State-Ghana Research Partnerships Seed Grant Program is provided by the CSIR-Ghana; Kwame Nkrumah University of Science; Technology and Eastern Regional Hospital; Penn State’s Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences; the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences; the College of Agricultural Sciences; the Eberly College of Science; the College of Health and Human Development; and the College of Engineering.
View the full list of projects here.
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