Babatunde Olusola, PhD is a Lecturer/Research Scientist in the Department of Virology, Faculty of Basic Medical Sciences, College of Medicine, University of Ibadan, Oyo State, Nigeria.
He is a recipient of various awards, honours and grants as a postgraduate students, a researcher and a scholar within and outside the country as well. These include, among many (1) International HIV Research Trust Scholarship, HIV Research Trust Foundation, UK in 2014; (2) ASM Student and Postdoctoral Travel Award sponsored by American Society of Microbiology to attend ASM Microbe 2019 in San Francisco CA, USA, and; (3) Mentored research award, NIH-Supported University of Ibadan Medical Education Partnership Initiative for Junior Faculty Research Training Programme at the Institute for Global Health, Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University, Illinois, USA in 2021. He has attended numerous trainings and workshops as well.
Part of his contribution to science include (1) designing and establishing the Ibadan early HIV cohort to enable virological and immunological studies on the natural history of HIV infection for strains circulating in West Africa; (2) being the contact person (Laboratory component) for the SARS COV2 emergency pandemic response and surveillance project of the Department of Virology, UCH, one of the Nigerian Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) accredited laboratories regarding response to the SARS COV2 outbreak in Nigeria; (3) being an active member of a national research group formed in 2018 in Nigeria to investigate and establish molecular techniques to provide useful information in diagnosing, treating, and controlling arthropod-borne and zoonotic viruses’ molecular epidemiology such as Dengue, Chikungunya, and paramyxoviruses in Nigeria.
He has numerous publications to his name, and he presently teaches, at the University of Ibadan’s Departments of Virology and Microbiology, Molecular Biology, Immunology and Virology to undergraduate and postgraduate students; co-supervises of laboratory aspects of BSc, MSc, and MPhil projects in Microbiology, Biomedical Laboratory Science, and Virology; and offer practical classes in Tissue Culture, Molecular Biology, Virology, Serology, Immunology and Hematology to undergraduate medical and science students and postgraduate virology students. He has a long-term research vision to become a research leader in Africa investigating immune ecosystems of RNA virus-infected host cells as a pathway to vaccine and antivirals development.
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