“From a young age, I would find myself looking at buildings, roads and noticing the difference. I always thought I wanted to do Architecture and later on decided to do Civil Engineering upon advice from an uncle,” says 20-year-old Jamie Mbabazi Magezi.
He wants to be his own person and build a name for himself which is exactly what he is doing. Born and raised in Kampala, Uganda, Magezi attended Kampala Parents’ School and Rainbow International School before moving to the United States where he is currently pursuing a Bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering at Arizona State University.
Outside of his studies, Magezi keeps himself busy as a customer service representative for the University Housing Department, President of the East African Students Association, and somehow still finds time for the gym.
He is, by every measure, someone who does not sit still. And in only his second year of university, Magezi is already making waves far beyond the classroom. More than 1,000 applications were submitted for the Fulton Undergraduate Research Initiative (FURI), a premier program within the Ira A.
Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University that gives undergraduate students the opportunity to engage in hands-on, faculty-mentored research. The program comes with funding, real laboratory experience, and a chance to present findings at the semiannual Fulton Forge Student Research Expo.
Only 100 students were accepted into the January 2026 cohort, and Magezi was one of them, the only Ugandan and one of just three Africans selected, alongside a student from Ethiopia and another from Mozambique.
This is a huge achievement and a statement of intent for someone who wants to build a name for himself.
“After summer 2025, I realized I was doing really well academically so, I decided to venture into something else; research,” Magezi tells The Observer in an interview, with a quiet smile.
SOLUTIONS FOR UGANDA, BY UGANDANS
He reached out to one of his professors and wanted his research to feel personal, something he had seen with his own eyes growing up, something that could eventually be taken back home and actually make a difference.
He was assigned Emmanuel Salifu, an assistant professor of bio-geotechnical engineering in the School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment, as his mentor. Salifu had specialized in fungi and so Magezi’s research had to involve fungi.
The problem Magezi set out to tackle is one that has frustrated Uganda for years. In the western regions of Kampala and areas surrounding lakes, the soil is sulfate-rich.
When Uganda experiences its heavy and frequent rainfall, these clay soils absorb water and begin to swell, causing crystals to grow to about 2.5 times their original volume, particularly when mixed with cement during road construction.
The result is roads crack and crumble from beneath, a problem that has plagued the country for decades.
“In the United States you can see there is a lot of comparison,” Magezi explains.
“In Uganda many individuals own land privately so they can’t plan for land they do not own yet, while in the States the government has to first approve land ownership.”
It is a difference that shapes everything about how infrastructure is built and maintained. Conventional treatments for the sulfate-contaminated soil exist, but they are expensive, carbon-intensive, and logistically difficult to apply in a developing country.
Magezi wanted something better; something sustainable, affordable and practical enough to actually work back home. His answer was fungi. As in, mushrooms. Since his mentor had previously specialized in fungi, he decided to test whether the same could work on the sulfate in soil.
Magezi chose to work with the Pleurotus ostreatus strain, which is an oyster mushroom fungus. The research is mainly focused on roads and infrastructure.
“When you are doing research, it seems so perfect on paper until you get into the actual thing,” Magezi says.
“You have to try and make it as realistic as possible. It takes time and a lot of understanding, you have to be patient.”
That patience paid off. Within just 36 hours of the fungal treatment being introduced, electrical conductivity in the soil dropped by 50 per cent. Over the full course of the experiment, dissolved salt levels fell by nearly 57 per cent in the most effective treatment group compared to untreated sulfate soil.
Electrical conductivity is a direct scientific measure of how many dissolved ions, including sulfate, are present in the soil; so, a reduction of that scale is significant. It means the fungus is not just sitting in the soil doing nothing.
It is actively breaking down and transforming the sulfate, altering the soil’s chemical environment from within. Alongside this, soil pH dropped consistently in every group where the fungus was present, with the most acidic reading of 3.69 recorded in the triple combination group of F60 sand, magnesium sulfate and P. ostreatus.
This pattern points towards organic acid secretion as a likely driver; the fungus is metabolically active and chemically reshaping the soil around it.
CAN IT BE IMPLEMENTED IN UGANDA?
As for where the fungus would come from if this were to be implemented in Uganda, Magezi has already thought about that. Uganda can order the specific strains, grow them, incubate them and turn them into a powder that can be spread across different construction sites, making is a genuinely accessible solution for a country that needs one.
The significance of Magezi’s findings is not lost on those working in the field. Keith Kwehangana, a civil engineer familiar with the challenges of sulfate damage in Uganda’s construction sector explains the scale of the problem.
“Sulfates in soil are a well-known challenge in civil engineering and material science. When sulfates penetrate concrete, especially in the presence of moisture, they react with cement to form expansive products such as gypsum, which occupy more volume within the concrete, leading to internal expansion, cracking and gradual deterioration. The same issue affects roads and pavements, contributing to cracking and affecting soil stability and compaction.”
Currently, the industry manages sulfate problems using sulfate resistant cement, admixtures, and supplementary materials such as fly ash and slag. But Kwehangana sees genuine promise in what Jamie is doing.
“What makes this fungi research interesting is the possibility that fungi could help absorb or immobilize sulfate compounds in the soil in an environmentally friendly and sustainable way. If the research continues to show positive results, it could become a valuable tool for improving infrastructure durability and soil treatment methods in the future.”
However, Kwehangana is also candid about the road ahead.
“After proving the concept scientifically, the next major challenges would be scalability, cost, long term field performance, and eventual adoption into construction standards and engineering practice. For most residential and commercial structures here, we don’t face problems due to sulfate attacks mainly; it is mostly due to poor mix designs and poor workmanship, especially with our roads. So, it is good, but I find it hard to see good industrial applications apart from bridges, dams and retaining walls – those big projects where environmental exposure parameters really matter.”
While the results are exciting, Magezi and Salifu are both measured about what comes next. There are still important questions to answer. There is the need to control the fungal growth carefully specifically preventing P. ostreatus from fully growing and producing mushrooms above ground, as this could attract termites to the site and create a whole new problem for the infrastructure being protected.
How many mushrooms would grow and how far the spores might spread is still yet to be fully tested, and the team is exploring whether turning the fungi into a powder could help manage this.
Future work will focus on the long-term stability of the treatment, pinpointing the exact biological mechanisms at play, and eventually testing the approach under real field conditions rather than in a laboratory.
For Magezi, though, the destination is clear. Within the next ten years he plans to complete his Bachelor’s degree, pursue a Master’s, become a licensed professional engineer in the United States, and ultimately take everything he has learned back to Uganda to have a real impact on the ground.
Uganda has roads that are cracking, infrastructure that is failing, and communities that are suffering because of it. If fungi can be part of the solution, well and good. At just 20 years old, having already achieved more than most people his age, Jamie Mbabazi Magezi is not just studying civil engineering; he is quietly working on an answer to one of his country’s most persistent problems, one petri dish at a time. So, colleagues, as you are crying about the Ugandan roads and infrastructure, help is on the way.
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