In June, the University announced a $100,000 top prize to Morgan’s Team AgroVision at the Capital One/Delaware State University Innovation Venture Competition. Nyarko and two other students leveraged “artificial intelligence, renewable energy and smart agriculture technologies to tackle food insecurity, climate volatility and resource scarcity in farming” at the event, a Morgan press release reads.
At BWI Thurgood Marshall Airport in July, Nyarko demonstrated autonomous wheelchair technology he helped develop with a team of researchers from Morgan’s National Transportation Center (NTC) and the university’s Center for Equitable Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Systems (CEAMLS).
And this month came word of a first-place win for Nyarko and his two Morgan teammates at MIT’s Hack the Climate Hackathon.
Nyarko arrived in the U.S. three years ago from his home country, Ghana, where he grew up in Kwahu, in Ghana’s Eastern Region. After showing a remarkable talent for writing computer code beginning when he was 7, Nyarko traveled to Ghana’s Central Region to attend the University of Cape Coast (UCC). Joining the NSBE chapter there enabled him to begin realizing his dreams of using technology for good — helping disabled people, addressing environmental problems and taking on other big challenges. NSBE also provided a life-changing leadership experience: his service as chapter vice president.
NSBE “was all about engineering and society and having different people with different minds come share ideas and thoughts,” Nyarko says, “students from different departments: physics, actuarial science, agricultural engineering. Our different backgrounds really helped me a lot because today I do interdisciplinary research.”
“And then there were the (practicing) engineers and NSBE graduates in the organization who were also sharing,” he adds. “We would hold conferences and other events, and they would come and advise us…. And then becoming vice president gave me more of a platform to be able to share what I knew and then get inspired even more by the people who were ahead of me.”
His involvement with NSBE helped him build a stellar record at the university, Nyarko says, including Best Engineering Student honors in 2020, affirming the excellence of work such as his creation of an AI-driven robot to feed the disabled.
After his graduation from UCC, Morgan became his next academic home, at the advice of his mentor, Paa Kwasi Adusei, Ph.D., who was also a UCC and Morgan alum. Not resting on his recent accolades, Nyarko is advancing team projects this semester, under the direction of his faculty advisor, Kofi Nyarko, Ph.D. (no close relation), professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Morgan. Those projects include, among others, development of a marketable hydroponics product based on Team AgroVision’s research and refining Morgan’s autonomous wheelchair.
And his connection to NSBE Ghana remains strong.
“I’ve been mentoring some of the new chapter executives in Ghana. And when I was in Ghana about six months ago, I was at the university to speak to some of the NSBE folks there,” Nyarko says. “From time to time, we (chapter alumni) help subject matter experts go there to speak with the students to have the kinds of talks we benefited from as undergraduates.”
