Veneranda Mugaya Ngazi says her interest in science started when she was very young, as she admired her mother, a principal agricultural research officer who was a soil scientist/agronomist. “I was inspired to follow a career in research,” she says. “My dad worked with animals but I decided to work with plants.” As the last born in a family of five, she followed in the footsteps of her mother and two of her sisters, both of whom also attended SUA. “I went to SUA for my undergraduate degree in Biotechnology and Laboratory Science,” she says. She then followed up with a master’s degree in Crop Sciences at Makerere University, which she just completed in January 2018.