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Published: July 11, 2012

Democratic Republic of Congo loses an academic trail-blazer

John Bates, Curator and Section Head, Life Sciences, Negaunee Integrative Research Center

I find that many of the people I most admire are those who focus their energies on local universities and science.  Generally receiving far too little recognition, their contributions live on in the programs they create and the students and colleagues they motivate to continue on in science.  The long-term impacts of these contributions are substantial for the regions these dedicated academics represent.  Together with Charles Kahindo, our long-time colleague who is a professor at Université Officielle de Bukavu and the Project Manager of WWF-Lake Tanganyika Catchment (Uvira, D. R. Congo), we have prepared the following.

I find that many of the people I most admire are those who focus their energies on local universities and science.  Generally receiving far too little recognition, their contributions live on in the programs they create and the students and colleagues they motivate to continue on in science.  The long-term impacts of these contributions are substantial for the regions these dedicated academics represent.  Together with Charles Kahindo, our long-time colleague who is a professor at Université Officielle de Bukavu and the Project Manager of WWF-Lake Tanganyika Catchment (Uvira, D. R. Congo), we have prepared the following:

On 2nd July 2012, Dominique Nyakabwa Mutabana, one of the most important biologists in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo succumbed to an illness at the age of 64 while working in Kisangani.  Prof Nyakabwa, or just “Prof” as he was generally known was a botanist with more than 50 publications on plants of the eastern Congo. For more than 30 years, he was a professor with attachments to multiple academic institutions.  He began his teaching career at the Université de Kisangani after completing his Ph.D. in 1982.  He helped found the long-awaited Université Officielle de Bukavu (UOB), which started as a branch of Kisangani University in 1993, and he diligently headed the institution for 16 years until 2009. Through the years, he would travel back and forth between the Bukavu and Kisangani to teach and administrate, even as war crippled the region.  In Bukavu, he had additional associations with Université Catholique de Bukavu and the Université Evangélique de Bukavu.  He also was a guest lecturer at universities in Rwanda and Burundi.  He participated in several of our PBEATRA training courses through the years and we always met with him in Bukavu to discuss the university and plans to continue educational programs.  Through these different institutions and though other connections, he served as an advisor for many Congolese and Belgian graduate students.

Prof. Nyakabwa teaching during the 2002 PBEATRA course at the Centre de Recherche en Sciences Naturelles, Lwiro.

Prof was a teacher, advisor, and able administrator who cared deeply about moving forward biological sciences in the region.  In Bukavu, he leaves behind a cadre of younger professors at UOB who will carry on his commitment to universities and science. The news of Prof Nyakabwa’s death news passed quickly to the many people he interacted with through the years and friends, colleagues, and former students came from Kinshasa, Goma and Kisangani to Bukavu to honor his life this past weekend.  His accomplishments were substantial and critical for a region where science and education are essential for the future. 

Me, Josh Engel, and three of Prof Nyakabwa's Université Officielle de Bukavu Biology colleagues, Jean-Berkmans B. Muhigwa, Bertin Murhabale Cisirika, and Christian Amani touring a newly constructed lab on the UOB campus, April, 2012

John Bates
Curator and Section Head, Life Sciences

Contact Information

The tropics harbor the highest species diversity on the planet.  I am most intrigued by evolution at the tips of the tree of life.  My students and I study genetic structure in tropical birds and other organisms to address how this diversity evolved and how it continues to evolve as climates change and humans continue to alter landscapes.

We study comparative genetic structure and evolution primarily in the Afrotropics, the Neotropics, and the Asian tropics.  I am an ornithologist, but students working with me and my wife Shannon Hackett and other museum curators also have studied amphibians and small mammals (bats and rodents) and more recently internal, external and blood parasites (e.g., Lutz et al. 2015, Block et al. 2015, Patitucci et al. 2016).  Research in the our lab has involved gathering and interpreting genetic data in both phylogeographic and phylogenetic frameworks. Phylogenetic work on Neotropical birds has focused on rates of diversification and comparative biogeography (Tello and Bates 2007, Pantané et al 2009, Patel et al. 2011, Lutz et al. 2013, Dantas et al. 2015).  Phylogeographic work has sought to understand comparative patterns of divergence at level of population and species across different biomes (Bates et al 2003, Bates et al. 2004, Bowie et al. 2006, I. Caballero dissertation research, Block et al. 2015, Winger and Bates 2015, Lawson et al. 2015).  We also have used genetic data to better understand evolutionary patterns in relation to climate change across landscapes (e.g., Carnaval and Bates 2007) that include the Albertine Rift (through our MacArthur Grants, e.g., Voelker et al. 2010, Engel et al. 2014), the Eastern Arc Mountains (Lawson dissertation research, Lawson et al. 2015), the Philippines (T. Roberts and S. Weyandt dissertation research) and South America, particularly the Amazon (Savit dissertation research, Savit and Bates 2015, Figueiredo et al. 2013), and we are entering into the genomic realm focusing initially on Andean (Winger et al. 2015) and Amazonian birds (through our NSF Dimensions of Diversity grant). Shane DuBay is doing his dissertation research in the Himalayas on physiological plasticity in Tarsiger Bush Robins.  Nick Crouch, who I co-advise at U. Illinois, Chicago with Roberta Mason-Gamer, is studying specialization in birds from a modern phylogenetic perspective.  We seek to create a broader understanding of diversification in the tropics from a comparative biogeographic framework (Silva and Bates 2002, Kahindo et al, 2007, Bates et al. 2008, Antonelli et al. 2009).  João Capurucho (U. Illinois, Chicago, co-advised with Mary Ashley)  is studying phlylogeography of Amazonian white sand specialist birds and Natalia Piland (Committee on Evolutionary Biology, U. Chicago) is studying the impact of urbanization on Neotropical birds.  New graduate student Valentina Gomez Bahamon (U. Illinois, Chicago) is also working Boris Igic and me, after doing her Master Degree in her native Colombia on genomics and the evolution of migrating Fork-tailed Flycatchers (Tyrannus savana).  Jacob Cooper (Committee on Evolutionary Biology, U. Chicago) is studying the diversification of birds in Afromonte forests

Josh Engel and I are working up multi-species phylogeographic studies of birds across the Albertine Rift, based the Bird Division's long term research throughout the region.  We are working up similar data sets for Malawian birds.  Our current NSF Dimensions of Diversity grant on the assembly of the Amazonian biota and our NSF grant to survey birds and their parasites across the southern Amazon are generating genomic data for analysis in collaboration with paleoecologists, climatologists, geologists, and remote sensing experts from the U.S. and Brazil.  These large collaborative projects are providing new perspectives on the history of Amazonia.

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