When Dr. Kelvin Leshabari was studying in 2008 for his medical degree in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, he felt isolated from medical researchers in the rest of the world. But then he stumbled upon a U.S.-based Web site, ResearchGATE, that takes the social networking concepts underlying popular services such as Facebook and LinkedIn and applies them to the research community. Leshabari, now 26, was able to connect with scientists in Germany, Israel, Canada, and the U.S. Since then, he has done collaborative research on Type II diabetes with people he found on the site and got a grant from the organizers to attend the 19th European Students’ Conference, a health-care confab held in Berlin on Oct. 4-7. “This creates a bridge between scholars in developing nations like Tanzania with those in the more developed countries,” says Leshabari. “It would have been almost impossible to make these connections otherwise.”
The outsourcing of software programming to developing nations has been a huge boost to economic development in some of them — such as India and Costa Rica. But while Western corporations such as IBM and GE have begun shifting scientific and medical research offshore, the activity has so far caused barely a ripple of economic impact in emerging nations. Indeed, Ijad Madisch, the co-founder and chief executive of ResearchGATE, didn’t have global economic development in mind when he started the business, but the Web site is now emerging as a potentially powerful link between researchers in the richest countries and some of the poorest ones, giving promise of a wave of homegrown — and locally relevant — innovation in developing nations.
Ease of Use
Madisch, who has a medical degree and a PhD, was born in Germany to Syrian parents and lives in Boston. He got the idea for ResearchGATE when he was doing…