Engr. Professor Kennedy Chinedu Okafor is an Exceptional Global Talent endorsed by the Royal Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the African Scientific Institute, and a Senior Member of IEEE, USA. He is the Chair of the IEEE Consultants Network AG – Nigeria, Director of IEEE Skillup Hub, Region 8, UK, and a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. He serves as a Cisco Systems Ambassador and Visiting Professor of Mechatronics Engineering at the Federal University of Allied-Health Sciences, Enugu, Nigeria. He has held Post-Doctoral appointments with Imperial College London, Manchester Metropolitan University, University of Chichester, and formerly Simon Fraser University, Canada, and is a Member of the Board of Trustees of AAIMLON.
Previously, he served as a Senior R&D Engineer (2006–2014) at the Electronic Development Institute, NASENI, Nigeria. In 2017, he received the Vice-Chancellor Award as the overall best graduating Ph.D. student from the Faculty of Engineering, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, in Digital Electronics & Computer Engineering.
Professor Kennedy holds multiple vendor certifications (32+), including AWS DevOps, Solutions Architect, IEEE Big Data Analytics®, IEEE Cyber Security®, IEEE Green IT®, Cloud Governance (CCE), CCNA®, CCNP®, CompTIA A+®, CompTIA Server+®, DevNet, CompTIA A+, N+, Server+, and IBM IoT Cloud Developer. He has over 16 years of R&D experience in Cybernetics, Robotics, Advanced Computing, Data Center Automation, Big Data Analytics, AI, and Cybersecurity.
He has organised over 50 IEEE conferences and workshops in Africa, including IEEE Nigercon, ICAST, Power Africa, Big Data Africa, MAC-2019, PAC2021, and Nigercon2022, and has served as a keynote speaker at IEEE events in Africa and Asia. He serves on the editorial boards of more than 15 high-impact journals across the US, UK, Asia, and Africa.
He leads several impactful projects, including the UK Natural Capital, Cloud 1st Pre-work, Mobile SMS ecosystem, Waste Management-Hazard Alert System (WM-HAS, TETFund Nigeria), COVID-19 Marketplace Robot (IEEE HAC Project), Cisco Digital Skill-UP, and the IEEE Solar Blood-bank Project (ISBBP). He manages IEEE Skillup Hub Nigeria, Cisco Academy (FUTO), and serves as principal investigator for MSR Labs, FUTO.
Among his accolades are Best Reviewer – Web of Science/Publons, Outstanding Volunteer – IEEE R8 ASYP Congress , and Nigercon Merit Award – IEEE Nigeria Section. He contributed to national initiatives including the Cybersecurity and Information Protection Bill (2009) and major ICT projects for the World Bank (2010) and PHCN Biometric Data Capture (2011).
Professor Kennedy has developed numerous technological solutions, including COVID-19 Robots, Ventilators, Smart Meters (AMI), Climate Change IoT Sensors, Data-loggers, Micro-grids, Spine-Leaf Data Centers, Digital Boards, Energy Tracking Systems, Language Translators, and Forensic Robots. He has won several grants and executed projects worth over £1.8 T in the UK.
He has authored 3 textbooks, 2 monographs, 5 book chapters, and over 150 peer-reviewed publications, and he has reviewed over 560 scholarly articles from Web of Science and Scopus venues. He collaborates internationally with LESA – Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Cisco Systems, National Instruments, and SPESRG–University of Johannesburg,