Steven grew up in Kenya, where he developed an early curiosity about the natural world that eventually led him to study microbiology at Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology.
After graduating, he won a prestigious JICA-ABE Initiative scholarship, a competitive Japanese government award, that took him to Niigata University, Japan, where he spent two and a half years researching how other non-nitrogen-fixing soil bacteria interact with soybean plants to influence inhibition of nitrogen fixation by high nitrate fertilizer application.
He then moved to England, where he is now a funded soil microbiologist at the University of Reading, SAGES, investigating trait diversity (beyond nitrogen fixation) of rhizobia, bacteria that play a quiet but critical role in soil fertility and sustainable agriculture.
Steven has also worked in solar energy with Solar World in Yamagata, Japan, and spent a summer developing an education technology business model for the East African market with Dive Into Code Corporation in Yokohama, Japan.
Steven is driven by a desire to see the knowledge generated in university research actually reach the people who need it most. He believes, too much valuable research ends up on a shelf or buried in a journal, never making it out into the world. His ambition is to change that, particularly when it comes to beneficial microbes. Many are well documented in research, yet few are ever deployable by farmers, and those that reach the market often do so as expensive bioinoculants, far beyond the means of the smallholder farmers who stand to benefit most.
