Patricia Kingori’s impact on academia has been rewarded.

The researcher can now celebrate a new title as she has received a full professorship at the Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities at The University of Oxford, becoming the youngest Black woman to receive tenure at the university.

Oxford awarded the historic distinction to Kingori to highlight “the quality and global impact of her research on academia and beyond,” Quartz Africa reports. 

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Kingori's Journey Is Rewarded

Quartz Africa reports, Patricia Kingori studies the ethical experiences of frontline workers in global health.

While studying at Oxford over the past eight years, Kingori has remained steadfast and busy. Kingori acquired competitive funding grants, wrote and cited moving publications, educated countless students, and has supervised a plethora of DPhil candidates, according to the university.

While it’s now evident that Patricia Kingori’s future will continue to be bright, her road to tenure was not without obstacles.

When Kingori received a Wellcome Doctoral Studentship to financially support her Ph.D. with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, she soon gave birth to her first child and went on maternity leave for a year. Once she had completed her leave, she relocated back to her Kenyan home to do fieldwork. Here Kingori became unsettled, as civil unrest caused her to uproot in 2007. By this time, she was bearing her second child.

Luckily for Patricia Kingori, she was able to return to Kenya within 10 months and finalize her data collection with the help of two new supervisors.

Once she completed her Ph.D., she scored the Wellcome Research Fellowship, which would permit her to do post-doctoral research at the University of Oxford’s Ethox Centre. Evidently, life has only blossomed for Kingori who has since upgraded from a research lecturer to an associate professor within five years.

“Patricia has moved many mountains and shattered countless glass ceilings to secure this historic achievement,” said Jan Royall, the principal baroness at Oxford’s Somerville college, according to Quartz Africa. “In the truest tradition of Somerville, she is a woman of firsts, a trailblazer. And yet, I have no doubt that where Patricia leads with such determination, implacable good humor, and brilliance, others will follow.”

Congrats Kingori!