Hunter Biologist Wins Carnegie Fellowship, Will Help University in Nigeria Train Doctors in Molecular Biology

Professor Olorunseun Ogunwobi, a cancer biologist, has won a major international fellowship. The fellowship is funded by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York to the Institute of International Education.

Co-sponsored by the U.S. International University-Africa, this Carnegie fellowship is perfectly designed for scholars like Professor Ogunwobi: distinguished African-born academics eager to make significant contributions to higher education in their home continent.

Professor Ogunwobi, who holds both a medical degree and a PhD in Cell and Molecular Medicine, is widely recognized as an expert on the mechanisms of metastasis in solid organ cancers. Born in Nigeria, he graduated from the College of Medicine at the University of Ibadan before moving to the U.K. and the U.S. to continue his studies.

Several years ago, he helped his alma mater revise its Molecular Biology Curriculum. Now, the school has advised the Carnegie program, because cancer is a major killer in Nigeria, “there is an urgent need to build scholarship and research capacity in the area of Cancer Biology.” As a Carnegie African Diaspora Fellow, Professor Ogunwobi will help develop Ibadan’s comprehensive new Cancer Cell and Molecular Biology Curriculum.

At Hunter, Professor Ogunwobi has also played a dynamic role in curriculum development. He teaches Cancer Biology, a popular 300-level undergraduate course, and The Biology of Cancer Progression, a 400-level seminar course that attracts not only Hunter students, but graduate students from campuses throughout CUNY.

Beyond the classroom, Professor Ogunwobi runs a lab on the Hunter floor of Weill Cornell Medical College’s Belfer Research Building, a facility devoted to “translational” bench-to-bedside medical research. There, with funding from the National Institutes of Health, he and his team work closely with other scientists from Hunter, Weill Cornell, and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

Eventually, the discoveries and advances they make at Belfer – a setting Professor Ogunwobi extols as “state-of-the-art and highly collaborative” – will impact medical school curricula in the U.S., in Nigeria, and around the world.