Professor Thomas Tony Onyango Mboya has been brutally murdered at his home in Kakrigu, Rusinga Island, Homa Bay County, in a suspected land dispute.

The attacker, reportedly armed with a panga, caught him off guard and ended his life.

Until his death, Prof. Tom Mboya was a respected scholar and the Director of the School of Mathematicsand Statistics at the Technical University of Kenya (TUK).

Born in 1970, he completed his O-Level education (KCE) at Kokuro Secondary School in 1987 and later pursued his Kenya Advanced Certificate of Education (KACE) at Homa Bay High School in 1989.

He then joined Egerton University for a Bachelor of Education (Science) degree, graduating in 1993.

In 1994, he was employed by the Teachers Service Commission (TSC). In 1997, he took study leave to pursue a Master of Science degree in Mathematics at the University of Nairobi, graduating in 1999.

After completing his master’s degree, he returned to teaching until 2002 when he joined the Catholic University of Eastern Africa (CUEA) as a lecturer. He served there until 2005, after which he traveled to the United Kingdom to pursue a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in Inverse and Ill-posed Problems at the University of Leeds, graduating in 2008.

From 2009 to 2012, he returned to CUEA as a lecturer. In March 2012, he joined the Technical University of Kenya as a Senior Lecturer and Chair of the Department of Statistics and Computational Mathematics, aposition he held until January 2013. Between February 2013 and January 2016, he served as the Head of the Department of Industrial and Engineering Mathematics.

At the time of his death, Prof. Mboya was an Associate Professor and Director of the School of Mathematics and Statistics.