Women Academics From Nigeria

"Doing research at an HBCU is amazing because the students are hungry. They come with excellence in so many different areas that inform their science. Having the opportunity to nurture the intellectual growth of this pool of students is a privilege."

"I’ve done work on glioblastoma. When I was in industry, I worked primarily on HIV. Right now I’m working on vaccines and drugs for neglected pathogens, working on different diseases like leishmaniasis and schistosomiasis. Occasionally I collaborate with people in industry to work on cancer. I also have some collaborations for infectious diseases like malaria."

"It chose me. I really wanted to make drugs. So when I started grad school, my goal was to be an organic chemist and synthesize chemicals in the lab. Then my mentor allowed me to play with every project in the lab, and I chose to drop all the synthesis projects and work on the structural ones. My intent was never to become a crystallographer; it just happened."

"As black, they themselves suffered as victims of a white patriarchal culture, as women, they also face racial, sexual harassment, and class discrimination by white men. Within the framework, most of the black women writers...deal mainly with the black woman as a victim of black patriarchy"

"My academic journey started when I decided to run away from Nigeria—I’m joking! I was supposed to go to medical school, but I was fortunate enough to get a United World College (UWC) scholarship. I went to Pearson UWC and did my International Baccalaureate. Then I got another scholarship to go to Trent University in Ontario, where I double majored in chemistry and economics and minored in English. After that, I moved to Texas and did my PhD in chemistry at the University of Houston. Next I did a short postdoc at the National Cancer Institute in Frederick, Maryland. After that, I went to industry briefly. I’ve been in different academic positions ever since."

"Of course you also fail a lot more, because you pursue crazy ideas. But in the process of failing, you find new directions that enhance your research."

"I know that if I don't do it, the chances of some body else doing it is slim to none."

"I believe I’m not going to stop learning until I’m brain dead."

"Oh, it’s everything. I think the ability to see connections where people don’t normally see connections is so important. When you’re able to think about problems from a bird’s-eye view rather than being stuck on the small, incremental aspects of it, you come up with solutions that people may think are crazy, but they end up being the best approaches. Of course you also fail a lot more, because you pursue crazy ideas. But in the process of failing, you find new directions that enhance your research."

"Broadly, my objective is to make therapeutics. I use structural biology, biophysics, and computation to study protein interactions with each other or with small molecules to design improved therapeutics."

"I’ll put it this way: my dad didn’t realize he was mentoring me; he thought I was just coming to hang around in the lab. I remember when I was in elementary school, after school, I would just wander over to his lab. And before long, when I was in middle school, I was coming over and helping with experiments. It was just fun, and it was a way to hang out with my dad."

"What you do may be different from your calling and you can only excel in the area where your passion is."

"She should not be in contact with a cat’s litter if she is pregnant. It also causes some changes and makes babies defective. But a combination of many factors makes disease transmission occur. If your level of immunity is high, you may not be down when others who are in the same place as you are down. We also have some people who do not believe in vaccines and those ones are usually the weaklings."

"If you come in there now and you say you want to change your course, we will allow you to go. We will rather have those who are genuinely interested than having a crowd of students who are there grudgingly. We have many veterinarians that are doing many other things in other areas now. But there are many areas, including disease prevention, where veterinarians work as I said earlier."

"In some developed countries, some people keep exotic pets and among several ways is bestiality which can bring sexual transmission of diseases. For instance, many people don’t know that a pregnant woman should not be in contact with cats because cats transmit a disease that causes abortion."

"I tell the younger ones now that they can be whatever they want to be and it is easier now to navigate. What you do may be different from your calling and you can only excel in the area where your passion is. I also always tell people not to force their children into any profession. Forcing children into professions we want is why we have so many doctors that are not empathetic. They are just there for the name and the money. That is why you go to hospitals and find doctors or nurses that are so mean to patients. But people who have passion for it do it with joy and they show empathy, make sacrifices, and don’t feel it as such. And nobody can excel in any profession they don’t have passion for. I found myself in Veterinary Medicine but I have evolved and I have a passion for it."

"I didn’t choose Vet Medicine. You know how it is with the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board and during my time, there were few professions parents wanted their children to go into. Parents wanted their children to become lawyers, doctors, and engineers during my time. If you were good at science subjects, they wanted you to become a doctor. When I took the University Matriculation Examination (now Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination), my parents chose Medicine but I did not meet the cutoff mark. I later changed my choice of course of study. One of my dad’s friends, a professor of Veterinary Medicine, said he would have loved me to study Vet Medicine but he said it was too tough that I would not be able to cope. But that was a challenge to me and because he said I would not be able to cope, I said that was what I wanted and that was how I ended up in Veterinary Medicine."

"It is in every profession. If you do something grudgingly, you are not likely to put in your best. So, I will advise people not to do any job grudgingly. The Managing Director of First Bank, Sola Adeduntan, is my friend. He was a year ahead of me at vet school. He is a veterinarian and there is another one at Stanbic IBTC, who graduated from Agronomy Department here at UI. It is better for you to find your way to your place of passion than to stay grudgingly in a profession."

"Of course, there are a lot. Lead causes cancer and other things we saw when I did my research. The impact is not only on animals. We eat fish and we accumulate this in our bodies. When you take a fish that has been exposed to lead, some of those things will be in its flesh and liver and when you eat it, you are also being exposed to lead. So, whatever we push into the environment eventually comes back to us because we are higher animals but it takes longer for those effects to manifest in us because of our body mass and all that."

"COVID-19 has brought that to us that we all live in the same state. You can not separate human health from animal health and environmental health and that is what we veterinarians call “one health”. That is the domain of my research."

"Let me give you a quick example. Have you wondered why there is an upsurge in cases of kidney failure? Between 15 and 20 years ago, it was not this bad. But when you look at celebrities now, you will discover that kidney problems have increased. The celebrities are the ones we know. There are many unknown individuals who are down or have died as a result of kidney failure. And when you look at it, it is being caused by what we eat or what we are being exposed to. It is difficult to ascribe a cause to this illness because some of those things take years unlike when you shoot somebody and you see on the spot that the bullet is responsible for the person’s death. If somebody has hepatitis now, the person won’t have liver cancer the same day. It will take a while before it manifests. You are aware that there was a time when it was said that some people used detergent to ferment fufu. That kind of thing will not kill somebody in a day."

"I don’t think we have enough. We don’t. In my area now, we don’t have enough. Veterinarians work in many areas and they are also in charge of ensuring that what we eat is safe aside from those who work on poultry farms and those that treat dogs and all that. We don’t have enough as I said. Even though we don’t have enough to cover our abattoirs, it is better now than when I was an undergraduate. The system does not even retain the ones we have. What used to happen back then was if you went into Vet Medicine, you would not be allowed to change your course even if you wanted to change. But now, we no longer want people that are there grudgingly."

"It is better for you to find your way to your place of passion than to stay grudgingly in a profession."

"There are different ways of transmitting diseases. I headed the Oyo State Decontamination and Containment Team of the COVID-19 task force. I know that there are so many factors causing the transmission of diseases from animals to humans and one of them is urbanisation. We cut down trees and move into the bushes and we come in more contact with animals. Ecotourism is another factor. Human beings don’t respect boundaries."

"If you do something grudgingly, you are not likely to put in your best."

"Toxoplasmosis is usually harmless, but in rare cases, it can lead to serious problems and cats spread the parasite via their faeces. Women are more at risk if they get infected in pregnancy. Toxoplasmosis can cause miscarriage. If it spreads to a woman’s baby it can cause serious complications, especially if she caught it early in pregnancy."

"In the order of importance, I am a mother, I’m a wife and I take anything that has to do with my family seriously. I have siblings and I have a mum but my dad is late. Those are some of the things that define me. Also, I am a researcher and a lecturer as well as an administrator. Those are the three things we do in academia. Some think because there is a strike, lecturers are not working but I am actively researching now. Even when I don’t teach, I do some other things."

"Whatever we push into the environment eventually comes back to us because we are higher animals but it takes longer for those effects to manifest in us because of our body mass and all that."

"Nobody can excel in any profession they don’t have passion for."

"I trained as a veterinarian but I have evolved, although I still offer services at the teaching hospital as an aquatic veterinarian. In Veterinary Medicine we also have disciplines. For research, I teach at the Department of Veterinary Public Health and Preventive Medicine and I research what we call “one health.” Like every other thing, research evolves, and so I parted with environmental health because that was what I did my PhD on."

"I tell the younger ones now that they can be whatever they want to be and it is easier now to navigate."

"I looked at the impact of lead in fuel and at that time, other countries had banned lead in petrol but we were still using it and I wanted to look at the impact of that on the environment. When you emit all these into the atmosphere and it rains, it runs into rivers and most of our pollutants go into rivers. I looked at the lead level in rivers in Ibadan. I looked at the impact on fish and I was able to see that what goes round comes round."

"Yes I sensed manipulations because we had an overwhelming victory, especially in Awka-South but the opposition party made all efforts to see that the votes that were cast by numerous supporters of the Labour Party were cancelled and the reason why it took so long to declare the results since Saturday the election ended and the results just came out this Monday evening of 27th February."

"Where things are done in an orderly way and where people accept defeat, these results should have actually been out but there seems to be some kind of distortion in the process by people who think they are in charge of the state."

"Nigeria is losing millions of dollars in revenue from false CSR claims by companies…this we want to stop with the introduction of the CSR bill."

"The Company Income Tax Act has a provision for expenses incurred in CSR. These donations, goodwill or infrastructural development they did in their communities, they claim it and at the end of the day, the tax they pay to the government is not actually the amount they are supposed to pay."

"The routes serve as horrendous channels for the influx of inadmissible aliens and goods. Nigeria at the moment lacks sufficient security personnel to safeguard the existing illegal routes across the borders."

"Today’s woman is running two full-time jobs in the running of her matrimonial home and her professional jobs within same 24 hours every day. There’s no more normal skills among our women, but super hero skills to run homes. You have to use your mind to maximize every minute of your time."

"If you do not use your time productively or to make money, you are in a close relationship with poverty. So, to improve our economic lot as a people, we need to invest our time in productive activities that can yield economic returns."

"I feel blessed to possess knowledge I’m able to apply every day in all that I do. When I see my children washing their hands or hear them talking about healthy eating and the benefits of eating fermented foods, I’m so proud."

"The other thing I really enjoy is being able to contribute solutions to resolve real world problems with visible impact. The eureka moments when things work out in the lab or when a manuscript is published, also bring indescribable joy."

"There’s a direct link of how we spend our time and how successful we are. There’s a direct link between how we manage our time and poverty. Some individuals make a whole country’s budget in a day! That’s the extent of the possibility of how we can apply our time.”"

"“We say we are not rich, we are waiting for miracle, but we don’t divide our time into productive activities, instead waste it on unfruitful conversations. For instance, a friend missed out on a N50million national research fund grant when he came one-and- half hour late to the meeting they were supposed to select the team that would benefit the grant. He lives to regret it."

"Teaching is like a calling, you must be trained for it and you must have passion for it."

"Many people know you to be an educationist but not many know that you were a big time trader who began at the age of nine."

"I don’t entertain any fear, because I live every day as being tailored by Jehovah God. All I needed, Many people know i am an educationist but not many know that I am a big time trader who began at the age of nine."

"My mother trained us the children in the act of buying and selling. She started with clothes. She exposed us to the nitty-gritty of trade. She told me the importance of being a trader as early as when I was nine. My brother-in-law, brought me into commerce by getting me the distributorship of so many breweries and cement companies."

"That is not true. Both installations were done openly and there’s nothing hidden about the two titles; there is nothing mystical about it. Iyalode means prime minister of the womenfolk. It requires someone who has integrity and who’s hardworking."

"I don’t have anything called sad day and I don’t pray for anyone to have a sad day. But there was a day I felt the grace and faithfulness of Jehovah God in my school, when a three-year-old girl swallowed a 5 kobo coin many years ago."

"It is true. It was given to him in 1957 by the Queen of England. It was a solid sterling silver, which I inherited. The day I was given the MFR title in 2004 by former President Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, I wore the MBE medal."