Charles

Pr. Charles Fon Abi was born in 1956 in Olorunti village -Ambelle clan in the Widikum Subdivision, North West region of Cameroon. After his primary school education in Roman Catholic Mission Schools Olorunti, Ayukaba and Widikum, he proceeded to Sacred Heart College Mankon in 1969 for secondary education and later on (1974) to CCAST Bambili for High School studies. He decided to teach physics and mathematics at Saint Joseph’s College, Sasse for a year before embarking on a university education. He gained admission into the University of Lagos, Nigeria in 1977 and graduated with a First Class B.Sc (Honours) degree in Chemical Engineering in 1981. Inspired by his brilliant academic performance at the undergraduate level, the Government through a recommendation from its Cultural Services at the Cameroonian Embassy in Lagos renewed his scholarship and transferred it to Great Britain, after he had spent another full year at the University of Lagos doing the M.Sc/M.Phil programme. He then gained admission into the Imperial College of Science and Technology, London in 1982 where he obtained his PhD from the University of London and the Diploma of Imperial College (DIC) in Chemical Engineering in 1986 and 1987 respectively.

Eager to serve his country, he decided to turn down all job offers abroad and return to Cameroon immediately but discovered with greatest dismay that not only was the country not yet sufficiently developed to effectively make use of its high-level manpower in the field of Chemical Engineering (very few chemical and petroleum industries and the fact that Chemical Engineering was not offered and is still not offered as a field of studies in any of the eight state Universities of Cameroon) but that it was undergoing an unprecedented economic crisis. Undaunted by the arduous task of getting a job, he finally got recruited as an Assistant Lecturer in 1988 in the Department of Chemistry of the Higher Teachers’ Training College of the then-lone University of Yaounde.
Pr. Charles Fon Abi is currently the Secretary General of the International Relations Institute of Cameroon (IRIC) at the University of Yaounde II and Associate Professor of Applied Chemistry and Chemical Engineering in the Chemistry Department of the Higher Teachers’ Training College of the University of Yaounde I, after having managed the department firstly as an interim head and latter as the substantive head for a period of seven years (From 2000 to 2007). He is also a Visiting Lecturer of Chemical Process Technology at the University of Buea. He is actively involved in research in the areas of Chemical Reaction Engineering (Modelling, Simulation and Parameter Estimation of Fixed-bed Catalytic Reactors exhibiting steep temperature gradients), Environmental Pollution, Enhancement of Non-timber Forest Products, and Drying Technology. He equally teaches students in high school and university online.

He is happily married and a father of three Children.