Moving up: American Academy of Arts and Sciences elects two diaspora Nigerians
Two of the nearly 250 electees to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences this year have Nigeria to thank for the formative steps that steered their lives towards membership of this esteemed group of academics and other accomplished people. For Dr. Akinwumi Ogundiran of Northwestern University and Dr. Omolola (Lola) Eniola-Adefeso of the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) and, school life started in Nigerian classrooms of the ‘70s and ‘80s respectively.
Born in Maryland, USA, Eniola-Adefeso’s immigrant parents took her to Nigeria before she turned one. She remained there till she was well into her teenage years. “All I knew was Nigeria until I moved back to the US at 15 years of age”, she said in a 2019 interview with the Lagos-based City People magazine. And all she wanted at that age was to study Medicine at a four-year college “because I excelled in Science and Math” she recalled in another interview in 2022. But fate intervened.
At Catonsville Community College, she’d always leave her biology classes with more questions than answers. She always wanted to know why a problem exists not just how to fix it; she discovered her analytical mind. A visit to the college’s career counselling center and discussions with relatives suggested engineering as a more fitting career choice. Thus began her career switch to chemical engineering.
At the University of Maryland Baltimore Campus (UMBC), Eniola-Adefeso became one of first students in the National Institute of General Medical Sciences-backed Minority Access to Research Careers (MARC) program. She graduated from UMBC in 1999, got her Masters in 2000 and PhD in 2004 from the University of Pennsylvania on a scholarship named after Janice Lumpkin, one of her UMBC mentors.
Eniola-Adefeso spent two years as a post-doctoral fellow at Baylor College of Medicine prior to joining the Chemical Engineering Department at the University of Michigan in 2006. She remained there for eighteen years, serving as Associate Dean for Graduate and Professional Education while holding appointments in Biomedical Engineering as well as Macromolecular Science and Engineering. In 2023, she became the Department’s Vennema Endowed Professor and Miller Faculty Scholar.
In 2024, Eniola-Adefeso was named dean of the University of Illinois Chicago College (UIC) of Engineering following a national search to fill the position. She is the tenth dean of the department; her appointment took effect from October 16. Her election to the Mathematical and Physical Sciences subcategory of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences was announced around six months to that day. She and other new members are scheduled to be inducted into the Academy next October, exactly one year into her deanship at UIC and she will be the seventh UIC faculty member to join the Academy.
Dr. Akinwumi Ogundiran, who wears the triple toga of archaeologist, anthropologist, and cultural historian, will be inducted into the Academy’s Social and Behavioral Sciences. He joined Northwestern University in 2023, exactly thirty years since he relocated from Nigeria to Boston, and more than thirty-five years since he ‘discovered’ archeology at the then University of Ife.
Ogundiran was born and bred in the old city quarters of cosmopolitan Ibadan where the interests of “Muslims, Christians, Orisa devotees, etc” converged seamlessly.
“Very early on, I realized that the elders around me paid attention to history, stories, things, and places in the way they solved problems, negotiated differences, managed conflicts, and organized towards a common goal”, he recalled in a 2017 interview with UW-Madison’s Africa Studies Program. His immersion in that environment sparked his desire “to double major in history and literature” at Ife.
In his first month at the university, he learnt about the newly founded department of archeology from a lecturer who described the discipline as a subject that studies history “through the objects you see in a museum”.
“At that time, I was eighteen years old, I had never been to a museum”, Ogundiran explained in a 2024 video interview. He also didn’t get a full picture of what archeology was about but the lecturer’s description “appealed to me, so that same day I changed my major from history to archeology”.
Dr. Ogundiran got his B.A. from Ife in 1988, M.Sc. from the University of Ibadan in 1991 and Ph.D. from Boston University in 2000. He joined the History Department at Florida International University, Miami in 2001 and served as director of the institution’s African-New World Studies from 2006 to 2008. He moved to the University of North Carolina (UNC) Charlotte that year as the Chancellor’s Professor and Professor of Africana studies, Anthropology and History.
Throughout his teaching career, Ogundiran never strayed from “explorative curiosity [of] digging the earth for human-material footprints”. He has also maintained research and community engagement that is as rigorous as his classroom and faculty commitments. His field projects have attracted grants and material support from National Geographic Society, Archaeological Institute of America, National Humanities Center and Carnegie Foundation to name a few. He has received many awards and broken many barriers in the field of anthropology and archeology, barriers that underscore his oversight of the evolution of archeology, history of Africa and heritage management in the 21st century.
He joined Northwestern University in 2023 as the Cardiss Collins Professor of Arts and Sciences, Professor of History, and a Courtesy Professor in the Departments of Anthropology and Black Studies. That same year, he became the 18th – and first African – president of the then 42-year-old Society of Africanist Archeologists (SAFA). Come October, eight other faculty members from Northwestern University will be inducted alongside him into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
