Nas Yakubu

Nasiru Yakubu (Nas) has spent the past 15 years working at the American University of Nigeria in several roles. Nas graduated from the esteemed London South Bank University with a BSc. In Business Information Technology. After completion of his degree, he spent 2 years gaining experience with Oakland Associates in Sutton, UK. Oakland Associates, at the time, was contracted to provide IT services to one of the largest publishers in the world (Reed Elsevier). Nas returned back to Nigeria to take up an exciting position as a Library Systems Administrator. A role he excelled in.

Nas was hired to set up the first e-Library in any Nigerian higher education institution. The AUN e-Library has gone on to win several international awards. Nas’ knowledge of open source applications helped to migrate the Library system at the time (Millennium) to Koha saving the Library over $25,000 per annum in license fees. Nas was then nominated by the CIO to manage the first instructional technology unit. The unit was tasked with supporting all instructional technologies as well as training students and faculty on the use of these technologies for teaching and learning.

Nas was then promoted to the assistant director of Information Systems where his responsibilities increased to manage all applications and software housed within the AUN group (AUN Hotel and Club). At this point, Nas had completed an MSc. In Information Technology and enrolled as a Ph.D. student at the American University of Nigeria to study Information Systems. In 2019, after some restructuring of the departments under the Office of the Provost, more responsibilities were added to Nas and his title was changed to Assistant Director of Institutional Research Planning and Data Analytics.

In this role, Nas was responsible for the supervision of all institutional research activities which provide information to support institutional planning, policy formulation, and decision-making. The role also included data collection, data analysis, and research activities relative to institutional research and submissions required by state and federal reports regarding University activities. In March 2021, Nas had completed his Ph.D. exceeding the requirements to graduate as the first Ph.D. in the history of AUN as well as the first graduate from a Nigerian University to earn a Ph.D. in Information Systems, according to his external examiners. On completion of his Ph.D., Nas was made an adjunct Assistant Professor. Nas believes in lifelong learning and is currently enrolled with the University of East London where he hopes to earn an MSc. in Data Science. He also has a professional diploma in education and has undertaken over 15 professional development courses related to teaching, programming, cloud computing, data analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. Nas is a member of the teacher’s registration council of Nigeria (TRCN)