The Thomas Adewumi University (TAU), Nigeria is excited to announce the appointment of a new Vice-Chancellor and Chief Executive. She is Professor Francisca Onaolapo Oladipo.
A renowned ICT Don, Professor Francisca Onaolapo Oladipo has been appointed the Vice-Chancellor of The Thomas Adewumi University, Nigeria. The appointment of the new Chief Executive takes immediate effect.
Professor Oladipo has over two decades of academic and research leadership experiences and is the current Director of Quality Assurance, and Chair of the Computer Science Department at Federal University Lokoja. Nigeria. She also coordinates the Africa and Asia Implementation Networks of the Virus Outbreak Data Network (VODAN) and serves as the International Projects Synergy and Support Lead for the Nuffic Regional and Ethiopia Projects under the Orange Knowledge Program of the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs. She successfully leads the team of scientists and researchers responsible for the successful deployment of machine-actionable FAIR data points in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and the expansion into 88 Health Facilities in Uganda, Kenya, Somalia, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Liberia, Zimbabwe, Tunisia and The Netherlands. With her stellar academic and research leadership, Professor Oladipo is set to redefine the university’s mission to meet the 21st Century workforce requirement in a fast-evolving STEM ecosystem.
Professor Oladipo obtained a PhD in Computer Science in 2010 and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Electronics and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, USA under the TOTAL-MIT Empowering the Teachers Initiative. She is an alumna of the prestigious Machine Learning Summer School (MLSS), Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, and was trained in Big Data, Data Analytics and Machine Learning at the Oxford University Institute of Continuing Education and the Institute of Analytics and Data Science, University of Essex, UK.
Francisca is an inaugural Fellow of the Pan-Africa Scientific Research Council, a Grace Hopper Faculty Scholar and a fellowship alumna of several International Programs including the Heidelberg Laureate Foundation Germany, United States Department of State Exchange Program (TechWomen), Internet Engineering Task Force, the Women of Color in Computing, Widening Natural Language Processing, Women in Machine Learning, Black in Artificial Intelligence, German Scholars Organization, etc. She is a two-time recipient of the PyCon USA Grant, a recipient of the ACM FAT Fellowship in 2019 and 2020, and the 2019 Diversity and Inclusion Fellowship of the ICML. In addition, she is a Fellow of the Africa Scientific Institute and the Nigeria Computer Society and several other local and international professional and scientific associations.
In addition to developing innovative curriculum for multidisciplinary research, Francisca is bridging the gaps between research and practice in the areas of Theoretical Computer Science. Outside of daily work, she designs programs to increase the participation of females in the fields of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM).
