Oluwatoyin Asojo

Asojo was born in Nigeria, and volunteered at an orphanage whilst at school.[5] Her father was a chief laboratory scientist at the University of Ibadan, and she would spend several hours a week in the lab.[5] 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 from 10,000 applicants to be selected.[5] 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.[6] She received a full scholarship for her studies.[7] Asojo earned a PhD at the University of Houston in 1999.[8]

Asojo has conducted research in industry, academia and government. After graduating, Asojo was appointed a postdoctoral fellow at the National Cancer Institute.[8] She spent a year as a staff scientist at Tibotec in Rockville, Maryland.[5] In 2003, Asojo joined University of Nebraska Medical Center as an Assistant Professor.[8] She simultaneously managed the X-Ray crystallography facility at Eppley Institute for Research in Cancer and Allied Diseases.[8] Here she studied membrane proteins involved in multi-drug resistance.[5] She was awarded two National Institutes of Health grants in 2005, studying alternative treatments to the Hookworm infection.[5] She held an adjunct position at Olabisi Onabanjo University.[5]

Asojo is now at Hampton University in Hampton, VA where she is an associate professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry.[9] Asojo was previously based at the Baylor College of Medicine, where her lab are dedicated to the production, purification and crystallization of proteins.[8] She shares equipment with the Sabin Vaccine Institute.[8] Since 2001 she has coordinated summer research projects for disadvantaged high school students through the American Chemical Society Project SEED.[8] She is on the Fulbright Specialist Roster between 2016 and 2021.[7] She won the Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship in 2016.[7] Since 2014, Asojo has been an editor for Nature's Scientific Reports[10] and an associate editor specializing in crystallography for BMC Structural Biology.[11]

2004 - Gladys Pearson Fellowship in Pediatric Cancer[12]

2006 - University of Nebraska at Omaha Woman of Color Award[5]

2015 - Gordon Research Conference Carl Storm Underrepresented Minority Fellowship[7]

2016 - Fulbright specialist[13]

2016 - Society for Science & the Public Science Advocate Grant program[14]

2016 - Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship in 2016.[7]

2017 - Baylor College of Medicine Norton Rose Fulbright Faculty Excellence Award in Teaching[7]

Asojo's most cited publications include:[15]

• 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.
• 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.
• Nachon, F., Asojo, O. A., Borgstahl, G. E., Masson, P., & Lockridge, O. (2005). Role of water in aging of human butyrylcholinesterase inhibited by echothiophate: the crystal structure suggests two alternative mechanisms of aging. Biochemistry, 44(4), 1154-1162.
• 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 Asojo publications indexed by Google Scholar