Balik Scientist Professor Rodrigo Jamisola was awarded the Most Impactful Research Award and the Information and Communication Technology Category Award at the inaugural National Research Excellence Awards 2023 held on 07 March 2023 at the Gaborone International Convention Center in Botswana.

The awards serve as recognition for Prof. Jamisola’s recent work as principal investigator of the Botswana Defence Force – Botswana International University of Science and Technology (BDF-BIUST) Drones Project. The Project aims to develop drone technology from scratch, and Prof. Jamisola and his group demonstrated the successful flying of four laboratory-developed drones in December 2021. In the process of completing this project, Prof. Jamisola was able to mentor eight Master of Engineering students from his Simulation, Machine Learning, Robotics, and Technopreneurship Laboratory (SMaRT Lab). Negotiations are ongoing for the next stage of the project which is to develop military-grade drones for Botswana.

Prof. Jamisola came second to COVID-19 variant Omicron discoverer Dr. Sikhule Moyo from the Botswana Harvard Institute Partnership who won three awards.

Distributed by APO Group on behalf of Department of Foreign Affairs, Republic of the Philippines.