Professor Awiti is a consultant scientist at the CIFOR-ICRAF (Center for International Forest Research – World Agroforestry)
He was Vice Provost at Aga Khan University. He also served as Dean of the Graduate School of Media and Communication and Founding Director of the East Africa Institute of The Aga Khan University.
Before joining Aga Khan University, Professor Awiti was a postdoctoral fellow at the Earth Institute at Columbia University in the City of New York. He was also an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs.
Professor Awiti began his research, academic, and policy career over 25 years ago at the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) in Nairobi where with his colleagues pioneered novel approaches for the rapid diagnosis of land health. As the head of GIS/Remote Sensing, he set up the Decision Support laboratory at ICRAF, with a focus on diagnostic surveillance of land health problems. His early work at the watershed scale was critical to delineating hydrological watersheds, which define the Lake Victoria basin and using digital terrain models to derive soil erosion hotspots from flow accumulation models.
Professor Awiti is a transdisciplinary scholar, whose research intersects agriculture, ecology, education, society, population health policy, and the economy. As a public intellectual he has written over 750 opinion articles published in leading Kenyan newspapers and international publications, including the International Policy Digest and The Conversation. He was also a speaker at the TEDx Nairobi 2013 and is a regular commentator on public policy issues on news networks in East Africa and international media such as CNBC, CGTN, Bloomberg News, and Al Jazeera TV. 
Professor Awiti is also an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Geography and Environment at the University of the Fraser Valley in BC, Canada. He is a Governor of the Board of Governors of the IDRC (International Development Research Centre). He is also a member of the Biodiversity Advisory Panel for the Kenya Joint Venture comprising Africa Oil and Maersk, which is carrying out oil and gas exploration and appraisal activities in Northwestern Kenya. He holds a PhD in Ecosystems Ecology.
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