Hulda Swai: My first research grant

For Hulda Swai, a Tanzanian research group leader in drug delivery systems at South Africa’s Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, the road to research funding has never been easy although her unit attracted US$9.2 million in the past seven years. Here she tells Research Africa about her first grant.

I spent a long time in academia before I got my first research grant. I completed my bachelor’s degree in 1980 at the University of Dar-es-Salaam in my home country of Tanzania, and in 1985 I did a master’s degree at Imperial College in London. But it was only after completing my PhD in biomaterials at the University of London in 2000 that I went looking for my own research funding.