Centre for Research and Statistics (CREST)

Dr. Solomon O. Okunade
Director, CELDS

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Phone: +2348032335789

The Chrisland Centre for Research and Statistics (CREST), Abeokuta, Nigeria was founded in August, 2021 by the Office of the Vice Chancellor in collaboration with the Carnegie Fellow to the University, Dr. Olu Awosoga. It was formally constituted as the Chrisland University Statistical Centre (CRISTAC) to entrench the understanding of statistical analyses and packages in the education of students and staff of Chrisland University.

The centre was established and funded alongside the Carnegie Fellow during his visit to Nigeria. The Centre has been of immense benefits as consulting room to students and staff across all colleges. Presently, the Centre has been constituted into an interdisciplinary Research Centre with emphasis on service oriented policy research under the overall direction of the Centre’s Director.

The instrument establishing the Centre enables it to draw its Research Fellows, and clusters/groups from various disciplines both from within and outside the University. The Research Centre has no formal academic teaching programmes. Its Research Fellows discharge their teaching obligations as members of faculty of their various academic departments, while its Research Assistants are hired as the need arises and required to be registered Ph.D. candidates from various academic departments. The Research Fellows and clusters relate at the Centre to execute the Centre’s research programmes under the supervision of the Centre’s Director, assisted by specific Research Clusters’ Coordinators.

Objectives

The objectives of the Centre include but not limited to:

• Organising trainings for students and staff of the University;
• Guiding students to carry out statistical analysis for their projects;
• Guiding staff to carry out statistical analyses for aid research and publications;
• Attract the general public to the University and assist them with their statistical analyses with negotiable fees.

Apart from the physical trainings, the Centre has also been charged with responsibilities of organising series of virtual hand-on trainings for the benefit of the University community.

Achievements

Since its inception, the Centre has been able to organise series of hand-on trainings such as Workshop, Conferences, and Seminars and so on for the staff. Achievements of the Center include the following:

• Conducted and published a Carnegie African Diaspora’s sponsored Multidisciplinary Research titled “Impact analysis of pandemic on Nigeria’s stock market performance.” Research in Applied Economics, 14(2), 17-42. MacroThink, USA. Carnegie Sponsored Research. https://doi.org/10.5296/rae.v14i2.20560.
• Organised series of virtual hand-on trainings in partnership with other institutions across the globe;
• Organised bi-annual workshop on Advanced Statistical Techniques for Researchers for Staff;
• Annual training for final year students and staff on SPSS for Beginners (Primary data analyses);
• Annual training for the final year students and staff on EVIEWS for Beginners (Secondary data analyses);
• Trained some interested students to help others at the Centre;
• Guided the final-year students in carrying out their project analyses and interpretations.

Tasks and Responsibilities

With a view to cordinating the University research and grant-writing activities as well as the publications by academic staff members and cluster groups, the Centre has been upgraded to ensure proper coordination and documentation in the repository so as to put Chrisland University in the limelight and grease the wheels of research development while gaining its deserved recognition on a global level. Thus, the Centre is charged to perform the following responsibilities:

• Creation of the University Research Repository: This enables proper coordination of all research activities and publications of academic members. It also helps in linking these publications to the Chrisland University Website which is visible and traceable across the world.
• Coordination and monitoring of the Research Publications and Grant-Writing Cluster Groups to  ensure efficient, effective, and result-oriented grant-writing activities.
• Also among the top priorities of the Centre is the facilitation of procedures that ensure paper publications in top-rated journals among faculty and staff of the university.
• Research fund-raising, application, and management. 
• Possible inclusion of Chrisland University in global University ranking platforms such as Times Higher Education, Webometric Ranking, and AD Scientific.

To accomplish the goal of getting Chrisland University to be ranked in globally reputable platforms, the Centre would become more deliberate about transforming into executing and publishing impact driven research, and in high impact journal outlets. Usually Scopus and Web of Science indexations provide a rich repository of multidisciplinary academic research journals that can serve as a starting point to achieving the global ranking of Chrisland University. Also, the Centre would continue to register voluntary research clusters. The functional roles of research clusters include publishing of journals papers in high impact outlets, writing grant proposals, and frequently organizing strategically designed research workshops at the University, College and Departmental levels.

Finally, Chrisland University, through the Center would be deliberate about supporting its faculty and staff to attend local and international conferences where papers on the condition that such faculty and staff member’s paper has been accepted for presentation and inclusion in the Conference Proceedings.

Consultations

The Center is open for consultation for students and staff as well as the general public on a daily basis for three hours per day and on special schedule for general public.

Consultation Hours

Research and Collaboration

The Center is open to multidisciplinary research and collaboration from every spheres of human existence especially on innovative projects that can have measurable impact and can create meaningful, transformative change in diverse areas, such as Education, Democracy, Economic Development and Growth, International peace and security, Higher education, Health, Aging, Human Rights, Advancing Children's Rights and Research in Africa.

List of Staff at the Centre

1. Dr. Solomon O. Okunade Director, CREST