On 5th February 2026, NURTURE Global Project, which is Funded by NORAD, held an inspiring session in which talented growing researchers and highly experienced professors from multiple international universities met to drive global research forward via collaborative knowledge sharing and discussion.
In this session, NURTURE warmly welcomed its latest cohort of Ph.D. exchange group, who come from four partner universities in Ethiopia, at USN to facilitate a fruitful kick-off to their Ph.D. journey in Norway. Below, you can see a brief introduction of the cohorts and their projects:
- Maru Meseret – Assistant Professor of Health Informatics at Debre Markos University as well as a PhD candidate at the University of Gondar
Project title: “The Effect of an AI-Driven Clinical Decision Support System on Viral Suppression among People Living with HIV Receiving ART in Public Health Facilities of East Gojjam Zone, Ethiopia.” - Abebaw Agegne – Lecturer at Debark University and a second-year data science PhD candidate at the University of Gondar
Project title: “Causality-Enhanced Interpretable Ensemble Framework for Stunting Risk Prediction” - Admas Abtew – Lecturer in the department of Information Science and a fourth-year Information Science PhD candidate at Jimma University
Project title: “EthioPolicyNet:A Hybrid Ontology-Deep Learning Explainable Framework For Ethiopian Policy Document Classification” - Kibrebeal Getinet – Lecturer at Hawassa University and second-year PhD student in Data Science at the University of Gondar
Project title: “End-to-end Personalized Cancer Medicine: An Explainable Multimodal Deep Learning Approach”
Professor Shegaw Anagaw Mengiste, NURTURE Project Coordinator, opened the seminar, welcomed all the Southern and Northern partners, and chaired the session for presentations. Throughout this session, Ph.D. exchange group shared their groundbreaking research and outlined their plans for contribution to global knowledge during their exchange, creating an energetic atmosphere for an insightful conversation with highly recognized researchers in their field of expertize. Session’s discussion and mentorship panel included Professor Shegaw Anagaw Mengiste (USN), Professor Jens Kaasbøll (UiO), Professor Josef Noll (UiO), Professor Frank Karlsen (USN), Professor Lasse Berntzen (USN), and Associate Professor Marius Rohde Johannessen (USN). Below, you can see the points of discussion:
- Overview of Ph.D. research including progress, problem statement, motivation, gap, research question, objective, design, methods, frameworks, models, ontology, epistemology, plans and expectations during stay at USN, proposed future work and timeline, and potential opportunities and challenges anticipated during PhD studies
- Importance of the research to the policy, academia, industry, research, and community at large
- Rationale, feasibility and applicability of the studies
- Scope and source
Thanks to the impactful research of these growing talented minds and to the presence of NURTURE’s fantastic academic mentors the discussions turned out to be super engaging, deep, and constructive, framing an influential global collaboration that knows no border but ambition. Together with the Ph.D. students, NUTURE Project’s funders, coordinators, and collaborators aim for high quality research via effective and strong support means that span from co-authorship on publications to providing access to specialized resources like high-performance computing. NURTURE is committed to the success of these amazing Ph.D. students and their projects by enabling transformative research exchange and powerful partnerships, making them part of USN’s international family.
Below you can see the photos from the session:
