Dr. Moses Olayemi is an Assistant Professor of Engineering Pathways at the University of Oklahoma. A graduate of Chemical Engineering from the University of Lagos, he was awarded the 2022/2023 Bilsland Dissertation Fellowship by Purdue’s School of Engineering Education and he has a Ph.D. in Engineering Education from the same university.
Academic Pathway
Dr. Olayemi has had considerable industrial experience in natural gas processing plant engineering, process engineering in a fast-moving consumer goods company, and project engineering in oil and gas servicing. His experiences in industry exposed him to gaps between engineering education and engineering practice, gaps which eventually led him to resign and cofound a STEM education-based social enterprise in Nigeria. In his free time, he supervises the enterprise’s operations. He also has teaching experience in STEM education including teaching high school science, organizing professional development workshops for pre-service STEM educators, and conceptualizing animation videos for K-12 students and out-of-school youths to learn and apply STEM.
Research Interests
Dr. Moses Olayemi’s research interests lie at the intersection of STEM education, socioeconomic development, and the voices of the participants of these discussions in low-resource contexts (primary focus: sub-Saharan Africa). He works with a wide network of scholars and researchers in Africa and in the diaspora to unpack and understand what culturally relevant engineering education looks like in diverse contexts. He also develops and contextualized qualitative and quantitative research instruments for measuring the impacts of educational interventions in post-conflict and low-resource settings.
The following questions inspired his venture into the field of engineering education:
- What are sub-Saharan Africans’ perceptions of STEM education and how do these perceptions influence their policies and quality of life?
- How can STEM education be used as a tool for the socio-economic development of sub-Saharan Africa?
- How can STEM educators in Africa most effectively develop, deploy and improve upon curricula, pedagogies, and pedagogical aids that will create self-reliant, critical- and inventive thinking scientists, technologists, engineers, and mathematicians capable of solving local and global problems existing now and in the future?
- Are current assessments adequate measures for evaluating the competency and knowledge required of intending and currently enrolled STEM students? If so, what factors are responsible for so many first-class engineering graduates (especially women) leaving STEM fields in Nigeria and how do we improve the retention rates? If not, what assumptions, factors, and conditions are responsible for the supposed marginalization of STEM education candidates in sub-Saharan Africa?
- What are the oft-charted pathways of students from low-resource/conflict settings who successfully vie for and gain access to high-quality education?
Dissertation
For his dissertation, he employed an embedded sequential explanatory mixed methods design to understand culturally relevant engineering education in multiple settings, focusing on the Federal Republic of Nigeria as the Case Study. For his work, his paper, “Telling half a story: A mixed methods approach to understanding culturally relevant engineering education in Nigeria” was awarded the best DEI paper in the International Division of ASEE at the 2023 Conference.
He is the Founding President of the African Engineering Education Fellows in the Diaspora, a non-governmental organization that leverages the experiences of African scholars in engineering education to inform and support engineering education policy, practice, and pedagogies in Africa.
Past Projects
Notable projects he’s been a part of in the past include:
- Localized Engineering in Displacement (Kakuma Refugee Camp, Kenya | Azraq Refugee Camp, Jordan),
- Impact Evaluation of Psychosocial Support Intervention facilitated by UNICEF in South-Sudan. This project was funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID)
- Faculty Development at a Post-crisis University (University of Anbar, Iraq). This project was funded by US Department of State.
