Webe Kadima
Webe Celine Kadima (born 1958) is an associate professor of chemistry at the State University of New York at Oswego. Early life. Kadima was born in Burundi and moved to the Democratic Republic of Congo when she was 4 years old. She had to get the support of a government official to be included in the chemistry program at the University of Kinshasa, and after a year there she transferred to the University of Montreal, from which she graduated with a degree in chemistry. Her father was a diabetic and died from complications from diabetes while she was  at the University of Montreal. She eventually obtained a in bioanalytical chemistry from the University of Alberta. In her research for it she discovered that cadmium binds within the red blood cell mostly to glutathione and to a lesser degree to hemoglobin. Career. After graduating from the University of Alberta, Kadima held several different teaching positions and eventually became a professor at the State University of New York at Oswego. In 2004 she went back to the Congo for a sabbatical to collaborate on research projects, concentrating her research on plants used in the Congo to treat diabetes. She created  a nonprofit called the Bioactive Botanical Research Institute, whose mission was to investigate medicinal plants used in the Congo and to develop pharmaceutical preparations that would be affordable, useful, and safe. She has also worked to create an ongoing exchange of African students with the State University of New York at Oswego. In 2010 it was announced that she had received a $200,000 National Science Foundation grant for the study of how to expand the number of women in science. In July 1983, she published the results of her research on a proton nuclear magnetic resonance study of the  interaction of cadmium with human erythrocytes together with Rabenstein, Isab and Mohanakrishnan. She was later first author on a paper looking at the stability of the cadmium-glutathione complex in hemolysed red blood cells. In the "Inorganica Chimica Acta" she published an article about the kinetics of palladium ethylenediamine chloride in solution.