Takong Ridick Roland

Ridick Roland TAKONG is a PhD researcher at the Department of Environmental & Geographical Science of the University of Cape Town and hails from Cameroon. His affiliation to CSAG is through his supervisor Dr. Babatunde Joseph Abiodun.  Ridick is currently investigating the Potential impact of climate change on rainfall variability over the Drakensberg Mountain Range.   He graduated from the University of Yaounde 1, Cameroon with a Bachelor's of Science in Physics (2008) and a Master's of Science in Atmospheric Physics, Climate and Remote Sensing in 2011. He later obtained a Master's of Science degree in Information Technology from the University of Madras, India in 2012. Prior to moving to South Africa for a third master's degree in Mathematical Science at the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS)/University of Cape Town, He worked for a year as a Physics laboratory Instructor at PKFokam Institute of Excellence, Cameroon.   Ridick has skills in mathematical modelling and scientific computing which he acquired during his studies at AIMS South Africa. He also possesses  good programming, software engineering and development skills acquired through the master's in Information Technology. Particularly, He has good programming skills in Bash scripting, fortran 77 and fortran 90, Java, Python and some MPI programming. Furthermore, he is able  to use and manipulate different measuring equipments.   Ridick has a strong interest in model development, Climate Modelling and High Performance Computing. He is an advanced user of the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) Model with the ability to modify components to suite specific scientific purposes. He is currently modifying the WRF model to read meteorological variables from netcdf files directly instead of reading them from grib files to create intermediate files during  the WRF preprocessing stage.   Ridick's poster on his master dissertation won the second prize at the African School for Fundamental Physics and its applications in Dakar, Senegal. Moreover, He has also benefited from a number of excellence awards in his home country and some scholarships in South Africa.   During his leisure time, Ridick enjoys watching movies, swimming, playing lawn tennis, driving and exploring new things.