Jonathan Esole is a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center and a Congolese mathematician working on the geometry of string theory.

Previously, he was a Benjamin Pierce fellow at Harvard, a Marie-Curie fellow at University College London, and a Wiener Anspach fellow at Cambridge University. He also previously joined Northeastern University in 2016 and was tenured in 2019. Esole is a passionate advocate for African excellence in the sciences and women’s access to education. In 2018, he received the International Dunia Award and was named a Next Einstein fellow in recognition of his excellence as an African scientist. He is on the advisory board of the nonprofit Malaika and a jury member of the L’Oréal-Unesco For Women in Science International Award. In 2020, at the start of the pandemic, he founded COVID19drc, a start-up that uses 3D printers to produce personal protective equipment that is then distributed freely to over five hundred hospitals and universities in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

After the 2021 eruption of Mount Nyiragongo, a volcano in Goma, he created the Linda Project, a platform for African scientists, technologists, and entrepreneurs that provides training and equipment and advocates for open-science research and for African countries to own and control their data and scientific equipment. In May 2022, the Linda Project helped establish the first Congolese-owned seismic network monitoring the volcanos of Mount Nyiragongo and Mount Nyimulagira. Esole personally designed the telemetry of the network.