Getting accepted to an Ivy League school is a dream come true; having them pursue you is unimaginable. That’s just the position Ayobami Ogunmolasuyi, a senior engineering major with a mechanical specialization from Nigeria, was fortunate to find himself in.
Following his December 2019 graduation from UMES, Ogunmolasuyi will be an Engineering Sciences Ph.D. student in the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. Dartmouth offered the UMES student a full scholarship and stipend to attend the prestigious institution starting in January.
“It was a good feeling,” Ogunmolasuyi said upon being contacted by Dartmouth. “God is at work.”
Ogunmolasuyi was “discovered” when he attended an Annual Biomedical Research Conference in Indianapolis in November 2018. There he presented his research “Numerical Simulation of Fluid Flow and Mixing in Microchannels” that he conducted under the lead of Dr. Kausiksankar Das, associate professor, physics.
Microfluidics, the study of fluid flow and mixing in microchannels, has various applications, Ogunmolasuyi said. The most important of which are the functional organs on a chip. “These are functional human organs on a microchip which include the kidney-on-a-chip and lungs-on-a-chip for testing drugs,” he said. “The bottleneck that the micofluides industry faces, he said, is the inability of fluids to perfectly mix in these channels due to the miniature size of the mixing chamber, which is where our lab steps in.” He said they are exploring methods such as periodic slip and no slip boundary conditions, and baker’s transformation to derive an efficient mixing technique for fluids in microchannels.
After the conference, a representative of the school reached out to Das and said they wanted to talk to Ogunmolasuyi about an opening in the lab there. Ogunmolasuyi has been in conversation with them since and was invited to visit Dartmouth in August.
“It’s a funny story,” Ogunmolasuyi said. “I will be working with the senior associate dean of the Thayer School of Engineering on Ice Mechanics research, which was not the original person that contacted me. He snatched me from him.”
What does the future hold for Ogunmolasuyi? He would like to become a fluid mechanics researcher and hopefully start his own research company focusing in Fluid Mechanics.
Das, his mentor, couldn’t be prouder. “Achieving that feat (getting accepted to an Ivy League graduate school) from UMES shows that our students have the talent and potential to reach any peak of excellence in their career,” Das said. “I have no doubt that in the future Ayobami will continue to achieve more laurels and make us proud. Congratulations and best wishes.”
Details concerning the Das Research Group activities can be found at https//sites.google.com/view/kausik-das/research.
Ayobami is a recipient of a Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation fellowship and Dr. Das’ teaching and research are supported by the National Science Foundation (HBCU-UP Award #1719425), the Department of Education (MSEIP Award #P120A70068) with a MSEIP CCEM grant, and the Maryland Technology Enterprise Institute through a MIPS grant.
