Omolola Ogunyemi: Author and STEM Superstar

Omolola is a biomedical informatician and writer. Biomedical informatics is a relatively new and exciting field that studies how to effectively acquire, store, communicate and transform biomedical data, information and knowledge to produce insights that can be acted upon to improve human health. The professional society for US-based informaticians is the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA). Omolola is an elected Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics. Her research examines how artificial intelligence (AI) and telehealth can be used to improve healthcare in medically underserved and under-resourced settings.

Even though she was drawn to math and science at an early age, Omolola was always a voracious reader; her mother taught African and African-American literature at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria and so there were hundreds of intriguing books jammed into bookshelves around her house. Bored with her Enid Blyton collection, at age ten, she switched to reading James Baldwin, Flora Nwapa, Richard Wright, & similar authors. Although she was too young to understand much of what she was reading, the books opened up fascinating new worlds and fostered an unquenchable curiosity about different people and places.

Omolola was born and raised in Ibadan, Nigeria. She now lives in Los Angeles, California with her husband. Her short story, “Area Boy Rescue” was a finalist for the 2009 PEN/Studzinski Literary Award. It appears in the collection, New Writing from Africa 2009. Her short story, “Jollof Rice and Revolutions” appeared in Ploughshares in 2017 and was named to the list of “Other Distinguished Stories of 2017” in The Best American Short Stories 2018. In September 2022, her first book, a novel in stories, “Jollof Rice and Other Revolutions” was published in North America by Amistad Books, an imprint of HarperCollins. It will also be published by Trapeze Books, an imprint of Hachette’s Orion, in the United Kingdom and much of the Commonwealth. Omolola is also a part of the Miami Book Fair in November. Visit their website for details.