The ICTP-East African Institute for Fundamental Research (ICTP-EAIFR) has announced the hiring of two more faculty members who will teach in the new institute's masters and PhD programmes in physics.

Shoaib Munir, a high energy physicist from Pakistan, and Steve Ndengué, a chemical physicist from Cameroon, will begin their new assignments in spring 2019.

Shoaib Munir obtained his PhD degree in theoretical high energy physics from the University of Southampton, UK, in June 2007. This was followed by postdoctoral fellowships at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico, the National Centre for Nuclear Research, Poland, Uppsala University, Sweden, and the Asia Pacific Centre for Theoretical Physics and Korea Institute for Advanced Study, South Korea. He has also in the past briefly held a tenure-track position at the Department of Physics, COMSATS Institute of Information Technology (CIIT), in his hometown of Lahore, Pakistan. Munir has extensive research experience in particle physics phenomenology, with a primary focus on the additional Higgs bosons predicted in beyond Standard Model frameworks of particle physics. Over the years he has carried out a number of projects analysing the production prospects of such Higgs bosons, and more recently also of dark matter candidate particles in supersymmetric models, at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. He has more than twenty articles published in leading international physics journals, two of which have been cited more than 150 times each.

Steve Ndengué is a chemical physicist with research interests in a broad range of topics in physics. In particular, he is interested in the use of tensor contraction methods combined with quantum and classical dynamics to describe physical and chemical processes relevant to atmospheric chemistry, combustion, astrophysics and catalysis. After undergraduate studies at the University of Buea and a master's degree from the University of Douala, both in Cameroon, he earned a PhD in physics of condensed matter and radiation from the University of Grenoble, France. Following a teaching and research position at the University of Douala, Cameroon, he went for a postdoctoral position at the Missouri University of Science and Technology, USA.

Inaugurated in October 2018, the ICTP-East African Institute for Fundamental Research aims to raise the quality of science research and education in Africa by offering the same quality research and educational opportunities for which the Trieste-based ICTP is world-renowned, but at a location more easily accessible to African scientists.