Ogunseitan, Oladele
Oladele “Dele” A. Ogunseitan
Oladele “Dele” Ogunseitan is a Nigerian public health researcher focusing on toxic pollution and its impact on human and environmental health. He is a public health researcher at the University of California, Irvine. Dr. Ogunseitan works to improve global training and preparation for public health disasters. He serves on many organizations and boards advancing international public health and environmental sustainability.
“The challenge [is] to do something that takes you beyond your dissertation work. It’s important to find your own voice.” Dr. Oladel Ogunseitan (Barron, 2022).
Ogunseitan, O.A. 2023. Chemicals Management Approach to Sustainable Development of Materials. MRS Bulletin. https://doi.org/10.1557/s43577-023-00518-3
Ogunseitan O.A. 2023. The Environmental Justice Agenda for e-Waste Management. Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development. https://doi.org/10.1080/00139157.2023.2167457.
Ogunseitan, OA. 2022. Bending the Curve of the Electronics Revolution Toward a Circular Economy of E-Waste. One Earth, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.oneear.2022.10.016.
Ogunseitan OA, Gussin G, Jimah T, Wang S, Fenny A, Bada-Alambedji R, Andre B. 2022. The ten commandments of antibiotic stewards. One Health Case. CABI International. 10.1079/onehealthcases.2022.0003.
Ogunseitan OA, Schoenung JM, Lincoln JD, Nguyen BH, Strauss K, Frost K, Schwartz, E, He H, and Ibrahim, M. 2022. Biobased Materials for Sustainable Printed Circuit Boards. Nature Reviews Materials, 7(10), pp.749-750. DOI - https://doi.org/10.1038/s41578-022-00485-2.
Singh, N. and O.A. Ogunseitan. 2022. Disentangling The Worldwide Web of E-Waste and Climate Change Co-benefits. Circular Economy, 1(2), p.100011. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cec.2022.100011.
Oladele Ogunseitan was born in Ilesa, Nigeria, in 1961, where he attended school and completed a year of national service. He attended boarding high school at Christ’s School, Ado Ekiti, followed by a year at the Polytechnic in Ibadan. In 1980, Dr. Ogunseitan completed his Bachelor of Science in Microbiology from Obafemi Awolowo University in Ife, Nigeria. He went on to earn a Master of Science, also in microbiology, from Obafemi Awolowo University. He moved to the United States in 1983 and completed his Ph.D. in microbiology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, in 1988. A decade later, Dr. Ogunseitan completed a second master’s, a Master of Public Health in environmental health from the University of California, Berkeley.
As a young man, Dr. Ogunseitan was educated formally in school and culturally in the community. He cultivated a keen sense of observation and awareness of his immediate environment. He learned about various models of disease causation, including traditional belief systems, best understood as the Western concept of “miasma,” or bad air, bad environments, and polluted swamps that have a non-mechanistic influence on health. He was also vaguely conscious of germs in the environment. As he progressed in his knowledge of the germ theory of disease, his attention focused on the environment as the most important medium, and eventually, he landed on mitigating environmental pollution as a priority, based on coverage of oil pollution in the Niger Delta, and the rampant use of pesticides in agriculture and public health. Disentangling the health impacts of toxic chemicals from industrial activities evolved into a significant thread in his research, which now principally involved electronic waste and the lifecycle assessment of materials to make consumer products safer to prevent environmental pollution and human health impacts.
In 2012, he joined the American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical, and Petroleum Engineers, Inc. as a Hoover Medal Board of Awards member.
Dr. Ogunseitan is the co-chair of the Apple Green Chemistry Advisory Board, a position he has held since 2015.
From 2016 to 2018, Dr. Ogunseitan was a Foreign Affairs Officer for the U.S. State Department in the Office of International Health and Biodefense. From 2013 to 2018, he also served on the Board of Directors for the Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health.
In 2018, Dr. Ogunseitan became the Specialty Chief Editor of Toxicology, Pollution, and the Environment for the Frontiers Journal. Dr. Ogunseitan joined the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) as an Advisor for Training and Empowerment – One Health Workforce | Next Generation in 2019. This organization works with universities to build workforce capacity in Southeast Asia and Africa to respond to public health emergencies.
Since 2019, Dr. Ogunseitan has been the Director of Workforce Development at the University of California Irvine Institute for Translational Science. Dr. Ogunseitan is a member of the Competency Sub-Committee for the Consortium of Universities for Global Health, a position he started in 2020. He is also an Advisory Board Member for the University of California Center Sacramento since 2017.
Dr. Ogunseitan is the Founding Chair of the Department of Population Health and Disease Prevention. He founded this department in 2007 and served as chair until 2019. He remains a professor at the University of California- Irvine. Since 2021, Dr. Ogunseitan has been an expert for the UNESCO Inclusive Policy Lab. Dr. Ogunseitan is also a Member at Large of the Green Ribbon Environmental Committee for the City of Irvine. The committee works to increase public participation in sustainability and energy conservation initiatives. Finally, Dr. Ogunseitan has been a visiting professor at Stanford University since 2022.
For the past decade, Dr. Ogunseitan has served on the scientific advisory committee and has been a keynote speaker at the International Conference on Waste Management and Technology in Bejing, China. The conference is sponsored by the United Nations Basel Convention Regional Center for Asia and the Pacific. His participation has facilitated opportunities to collaborate broadly. Additionally, his role in the One Health Workforce-Next Generation project funded by USAID has provided opportunities to collaborate in building One Health Workforce Academies with colleagues in more than 100 universities in Africa, Southeast Asia, and the United States. This includes the honor of being invited to attend the inaugural steering committee to implement the World Health Organization’s Health Workforce roadmap for public health and emergency response.
Dr. Ogunseitan has been honored with numerous awards, including the Jefferson Science Fellow of the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine. Dr. Ogunseitan was elected as an American Association for the Advancement of Science fellow for the Medicine and Societal Impacts of Science and Technology and the American Academy of Microbiology. Dr. Ogunseitan received th Meritorious Honor Award from the U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Oceans and Environmental and Scientific Affairs. He also received an University of California Presidential Chair Endowment.
In his personal life, Dr. Ogunseitan considers himself blessed with his immediate family, his wife, Dr. Alison Holman, and their daughters, Coryna and Sofya. He is also blessed with his extended family of sisters, Bukky, Nike, Lola, and Tola.
Dr. Ogunseitan is somewhat of an aesthete and enjoys (trying to make) fine art, riding his bicycle, and language games.
In his capacity as Presidential Chair of the University of California, Dr. Ogunseitan sponsors scholarships and fellowships for graduate students in three topic areas:
1. Solutions that Scale at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) is an initiative that brings together leaders in the fields of education and research, public policy, and corporate industry in order to create and operationalize climate change solutions that can be scaled up to a global level. The initiative provides a Graduate Fellowship focused on supporting transdisciplinary research across two or more different schools within UCI. Dr. Ogunseitan serves on the Executive Board at Solutions that Scale.
2. Research Justice Shop (RJS), housed under UCI’s Newkirk Center for Science & Society, conducts, studies, and trains practitioners in community-based research. Graduate Students at UCI can apply to become Newkirk Research Justice Shop Graduate Student Fellows, also known as Newkirk Fellows, which also includes nine workshops on Research Justice. The mission of RJS centers around establishing ethical, non-extractive, and collaborative practices for community-based research. Dr. Ogunseitan serves on the advisory board for the Newkirk Center and informs the Center Director on how to support the Center’s programs, including RJS, and its broader mission of democratizing knowledge production.
3. Cancer Epidemiology Education in Special Populations (CEESP) is a program held at the City College of New York and is in partnership with the University of California, Irvine. CEESP provides graduate public health students with mentorship and research training in cancer epidemiology and cancer prevention in international and U.S. minority settings. Dr. Ogunseitan noted in a 2023 interview that CEESP is working towards expanding its network, building capacity, and ultimately increasing the number of public health practitioners who are able to conduct cancer research in underserved communities on a global scale.
Dr. Ogunseitan is committed to providing the best mentorship in his capacity to deliver support to students from a wide range of backgrounds and life experiences. He has mentored over 20 students who earned their doctorate degrees and embarked on successful careers. He has worked with more than ten postdoctoral researchers, several junior faculty members, and hundreds of undergraduate students, many of whom keep in touch. Dr. Ogunseitan sees mentoring as a life-long commitment and activities that enrich the mentee’s and mentor’s quality of life.
Barron, Madeline. Oct 24, 2022. Cultivating Collaboration: Spotlight on Oladele Ogunseitan. American Society for Microbiology.
https://asm.org/articles/2022/october/cultivating-collaboration-spotligh…
Dele Ogunseitan, Ph.D. n.d. Home [LinkedIn Page]. LinkedIn. Retrieved July 17, 2023 from https://www.linkedin.com/in/deleogunseitan/
Solutions that Scale. N.d. UCI. https://sites.ps.uci.edu/solutions/
Survey and interview conducted by Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Sustainability Initiative staff. 2022-2023. Yale University- School of the Environment. New Haven, Connecticut.