At the heart of Scotland’s 5G revolution is Nigeria’s 31 year old Yusuf Abudulrahmam Sambo!

Yusuf Abdulrahman Sambo is a research associate and the 5G-SON (self-organised network) test bed lead at the University of Glasgow, UK. Sambo was born in 1988 in Kaduna. He hails from Ikara local government, Kaduna state.

He is the son of Abdulrahman Sambo, former acting Executive Secretary of the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS).

At the age of 27, he completed his Ph.D. in Mobile Communications from the 5G Innovation Centre, reputed as the world’s largest academic research centre dedicated to next-generation mobile and wireless connectivity, at the University of Surrey in 2016.

Sambo is currently a research associate in the Communication, Sensing and Imaging Group of the University of Glasgow working on a £1.2 million EPSRC-funded project on designing autonomous and resilient emergency communication systems. His main research interests include EMF exposure reduction, radio resource management, energy efficiency, wireless sensor networks and device-to-device (D2D) communication.

He has designed and built the first real-time 5G testbed dedicated to Self-Organised Networks (SON) in the UK which runs on general-purpose processors. At Glasgow, he has also produced several proofs-of-concept and demonstrated various 5G use-cases including a prototype for the world’s first popup network that can be deployed in less than 2 minutes for emergency communications and rural connectivity.
Following his array of excellent ideas and implementation, he was awarded the coveted Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Impact Acceleration Account (IAA) grant for research on novel cooling systems capable of reducing the energy consumption
of 5G networks by up to 50 percent.

The 31-year-old co-edited the world’s first books on the verticals of 5G and EMF radiation from future wireless communication, published by the prestigious Wiley-IEEE and the IET,
respectively in 2019.

He leads the University of Glasgow research team on the widely-celebrated Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS)-funded 5G RuralFirst project. The project focuses on implementing a pop-up network for a healthcare use case in the Orkney Islands, Scotland.

The Kaduna-born engineer currently has 21 publications in top-ranked peer-reviewed journals and conferences. He is also a reviewer for several top journals and conferences, serving on technical program and organising committees of many international conferences and workshops.
When he is not revolutionalising 5G networks, he is supporting Arsenal Football Club, playing squash or traveling. Sambo says he loves food and is strangely a pen collector — he has about
100 pens from random places.