Women You Should Know: Oluwatoyin Asojo

Jeremiah Aluwong

3 years ago

Asojo was born in Nigeria and volunteered at an orphanage whilst at school. Her father was a chief laboratory scientist at the University of Ibadan, and she would spend several hours a week in the lab. She attended the International School Ibadan and applied for a United World College scholarship that would allow her to study abroad, and was one of only seven of 10,000 applicants to be selected. She earned an International Baccalaureate diploma in 1989 from Pearson College UWC. In 1993 Asojo completed a Dual Honours degree at Trent University, majoring in Chemistry and Economics. Asojo earned a Ph.D. at the University of Houston in 1999.

Read more about Women you should know

Research Asojo has conducted research in industry, academia and government. After graduating, Asojo was appointed a postdoctoral fellow at the National Cancer Institute. She spent a year as a staff scientist at Tibotec in Rockville, Maryland. In 2003, Asojo joined the University of Nebraska Medical Center as an Assistant Professor. She simultaneously managed the X-Ray crystallography facility at Eppley Institute for Research in Cancer and Allied Diseases. Here she studied membrane proteins involved in multi-drug resistance. She was awarded two National Institutes of Health grants in 2005, studying alternative treatments to the Hookworm infection. She held an adjunct position at Olabisi Onabanjo University. Asojo is now at Hampton University in Hampton, VA where she is an associate professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry. Asojo was previously based at the Baylor College of Medicine, where her lab is dedicated to the production, purification and crystallization of proteins. She shares equipment with the Sabin Vaccine Institute. Since 2001 she has coordinated summer research projects for disadvantaged high school students through the American Chemical Society Project SEED. She won the Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship in 2016. Since 2014, Asojo has been an editor for Nature’s Scientific Reports and an associate editor specializing in crystallography for BMC Structural Biology. Awards and honors

2016 – Fulbright specialist
2016 – Society for Science & the Public Science Advocate Grant program
2016 – Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship in 2016.
2017 – Baylor College of Medicine Norton Rose Fulbright Faculty Excellence Award in Teaching

Selected publications Asojo’s most cited publications include:

Sign up to the Connect Nigeria daily newsletter

Asojo, O. A., Goud, G., Dhar, K., Loukas, A., Zhan, B., Deumic, V., … & Hotez, P. J. (2005). X-ray structure of Na-ASP-2, a pathogenesis-related-1 protein from the nematode parasite, Necator americanus, and a vaccine antigen for human hookworm infection. Journal of molecular biology, 346(3), 801-814. (Cited 165 times, according to Google Scholar [15])
Asojo, O. A., Gulnik, S. V., Afonina, E., Yu, B., Ellman, J. A., Haque, T. S., & Silva, A. M. (2003). Novel uncomplexed and complexed structures of plasmepsin II, an aspartic protease from Plasmodium falciparum. Journal of molecular biology, 327(1), 173-181. (Cited 152 times, according to Google Scholar. [15])
Nachon, F., Asojo, O. A., Borgstahl, G. E., Masson, P., & Lockridge, O. (2005). Role of water in the aging of human butyrylcholinesterase inhibited by echothiophate: the crystal structure suggests two alternative mechanisms of aging. Biochemistry, 44(4), 1154-1162. (Cited 116 times, according to Google Scholar. [15])
Asojo, O. A., Afonina, E., Gulnik, S. V., Yu, B., Erickson, J. W., Randad, R., … & Silva, A. M. (2002). Structures of Ser205 mutant plasmepsin II from Plasmodium falciparum at 1.8 Å in complex with the inhibitors rs367 and rs370. Acta Crystallographica Section D: Biological Crystallography, 58(12), 2001-2008.
Hotez, P. J., Asojo, O. A., & Adesina, A. M. (2012). Nigeria: “Ground Zero” for the High Prevalence Neglected Tropical Diseases. PLoS Negl Trop Dis, 6(7), e1600.

Oluwatoyin (Toyin) Asojo is Associate Professor and chair of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Hampton University. She was formerly an Associate Professor of Pediatrics-Tropical medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine. She works at “the interface of math, chemistry, biology, computation.” She is a crystallographer and interested in structural studies of proteins from neglected tropical disease pathogens. Reference www.unmc.edu. Wikipedia.org medicalxpress.com. Featured image source: C&EN American Chemical Society

Got a suggestion? Contact us: editor@connectnigeria.com