DR LAYLA ZAKARIA ABDULRAHMAN

Dr. Leila Zakaria Abdel Rahman

Sudanese
Scientific Creativity Award
Dr. Leila Zakaria Abdel Rahman is a Sudanese woman who received her primary, complimentary & secondary studies at Kousti City, then at the Khartoum University, faculty of agriculture, where she graduated with an honored BA and got her MA in vital technology and her PHD on 1995 from the Engineering Faculty at the Yummiest Manchester University. During her primary and secondary studies, she was brilliant and a great future in the scientific field was predicted to her. When reaching high school, she chose the literature field but her teachers asked her to specialize in the scientific field but she refused until the school principal interfered and asked her to choose the scientific field. After her graduation, her American and English teachers thought that she will have a great future if given the chance to study abroad. After getting the MA in vital technology, she was working in one of the universities laboratories and the supervisor asked her to pursue the researches on a project that the researchers stopped working on, so she reached a very important result that attracted researches, experts and the media, and she pursued her work in the field until she reached the great discovery and got a patent for the artificial seeds of the sugar cane.

Dr. Leila always repeated that she owe her success to her grandmother who raised her after her mother, who was a teacher, passed away when she was only two years old. Dr. Leila was born and raised in AL Jabin. And even though her grandmother did not know how to read or write, she used to encourage her to study, and I think that she would have been very proud in what Dr. Leila realized in her life. In a laboratory in Manchester, the patience and continuous work of the granddaughter of a Sudanese tribe chief gave birth to a revolution in the sugar cane industry all over the world. Traditional ways in planting sugar canes from seeding till harvest are time consuming and expensive ways. Scientists tried for years to cultivate sugar canes genes in the water till their growth but didn’t succeed. However, Dr. Leila Zakaria Abdel Rahman, currently at UMIST and a former student at Manchester University outside Manchester Science Park, refused to give up. She found a radical new way to develop the sugar canes allowing their growth in the same way as other seeds, a way that is more productive and cost efficient, decreasing around 220 pounds of agriculture expenses for each acre. The new technology was protected by the invention patent that was given to her in the USA, Australia, Africa, Barbados, Brazil, China, Europe, Indonesia, South Korea and Srilanka.

The new method of planting sugar canes includes taking cells from the leaves, burgeon or the roots and planting them in water to produce artificial seeds that can grow later on (Hydroponic culture). The remarkable results had a lot of attention on the international level. Dr. Leila was honored by the government of her country by granting her a golden medal for her achievement in the sugar canes industry; she also won the award of the best project in the north and west. After that Dr. Leila’s new technique got the invention patent in several countries, Dr. Leila currently lives in Manchester Science Park, where she launched a business of her own on the “bio-technical agriculture” that will license her production methods to sugar companies all over the world. Dr. Leila’s husband works in the Sudan in the Kinania Company, a big company for sugar industry where she herself started working. Dr. Leila hopes that her work would help the industry in her home country. Today, Dr. Leila was given a second patent of invention from the USA the “antioxidant” that will be of great assistance in the medical industry and cosmetics and oils.