Prof. Hamadi Iddi Boga is the Principal Secretary of the State Department for Agricultural Research in the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries. He is the former founding Principal of Taita Taveta University College and was later its Vice Chancellor between 2007 and 2017. He is a Professor in the Department of Botany at the Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology. His skills and interests are in biology, agricultural science, microbiology and molecular biology. He specialized in microbial ecology of insects’ guts, soils and soda lakes and has worked with termites, the soda lakes of Kenya, mangrove swamps, agricultural and forest soils and also on Mount Kenya glacier. He has a PhD in Biology from Universität Konstanz in Germany and had a Post-doctoral stint at the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology in Marburg, Germany.