Biography
Aiah Lebbie is Vice Chancellor and Principal of the University of Sierra Leone (USL), a position he has held since July 2024 after serving as acting vice chancellor from February that year. A plant scientist by training, he previously served as Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Njala University. His research concerns the forests and plant diversity of West Africa, with particular attention to the role of community-protected sacred groves in biodiversity conservation.
Professor Lebbie's published work covers tropical botany, including the taxonomy of riverine plant families of the Upper Guinean forests, the genetic structure of cassava germplasm in relation to disease resistance, common-property natural-resource governance in West Africa, and the ecological surveillance of viral pathogens at the human-forest interface. He has held research affiliations with the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the United States, and has published widely on the flora of Sierra Leone and the wider Upper Guinean forest region. He accepted the distinction of Fellow of the Liberia Academy of Sciences in August 2026 through a signed letter of acceptance on University of Sierra Leone letterhead, in the context of forest conservation and Liberia–Sierra Leone cooperation.
His expertise is directly relevant to Liberia's priorities in conserving the Upper Guinean forest ecosystem, one of the world's biodiversity hotspots, and in building cross-border scientific cooperation between Liberia and Sierra Leone over their shared forest landscapes.