Why this site exists
A note on what I plan to write here, who it is for, and why a plant pathologist is suddenly building software.
I started drmaxchib.com because I had run out of places to think out loud.
For most of my graduate training, the natural home for any half-formed idea was a slack channel, a private notebook, or a hallway conversation with a labmate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. That worked well enough — until the ideas began outgrowing the disciplines they were born in.
This site is the answer. It is, deliberately, a single hub for three different threads of work that I no longer want to keep separate.
The threads
The science. I am, first, a plant pathologist. I spent six years in graduate school studying how Fusarium graminearum produces deoxynivalenol — vomitoxin — in silage corn, and what farmers can reasonably do about it. I am now a postdoctoral fellow at the USDA Dairy Forage Research Center, where the work has expanded into whole-genome sequencing, predictive modeling, and the chemistry of toxin biosynthesis. There will be writing here about all of it, written for an audience broader than the journals I publish in.
The building. I am, second, increasingly impatient with the pace at which African governments are failing to ship basic public-good infrastructure. The Nigerian Meteorological Agency is a useful illustrative case — but it is one of many. I am using AI-assisted development tools to prototype civic software that does what these institutions have not yet managed to do, beginning with weather data Nigerian farmers can actually use. Some of that work will live under a separate brand, RethinkNaija. The thinking behind it will live here.
The thinking in between. I am, third, a Nigerian who has lived for nearly a decade inside American higher education and American agriculture. I have opinions about both, shaped by both, and I’d like to write them down honestly without flattening them into the kind of LinkedIn paragraphs that perform well on the algorithm but say nothing.
Who this is for
Probably you, if any of the following apply: you’re a researcher who reads outside your field; you’re a builder working on civic tech, agtech, or anything African; you’re a Nigerian trying to figure out whether to leave, return, or build from where you are; you’re a funder looking for technically credible people executing on hard problems in markets that institutions have under-served.
Nothing here is going to be a hot take. I am too slow for hot takes, and the topics I care about reward patience.
What to expect
Writing here is grouped into four streams: On Nigeria, Science & Research, Building, and General. Posts will be tagged so you can filter to the threads you care about. There’s an RSS feed for the people who still believe in feed readers (correctly).
If you want to follow more closely, LinkedIn is the best place for now. The other social platforms will come online as the writing finds its rhythm.
Welcome.