Moses Olayemi

Who am I?

Moses Olayemi is a graduate of Chemical Engineering from the University of Lagos, a doctoral candidate in the School of Engineering Education, and a 2022 Bilsland Dissertation Fellow at Purdue University. He has had considerable industrial experience as a natural gas processing plant engineer, a process assistant at a fast-moving consumer goods company, and as a project engineer in an oil and gas servicing company. These experiences in industry exposed him to gaps between engineering education and engineering practice, gaps which eventually led him to resign and cofound a STEM education-based social enterprise in Nigeria. He currently heads the enterprise’s operations. His experience in STEM education includes teaching high school science, organizing professional development workshops for pre-service STEM educators, and conceptualizing animation videos for K-12 students and out-of-school youths to learn and apply STEM. His dissertation involves understanding culturally relevant engineering education in Nigeria and the United States.

Research Interests lie in:

• The intersection of STEM education, socioeconomic development, and the voices of the participants of these discussions in low-resource contexts (primary focus: sub-Saharan Africa).

• Culturally relevant pedagogy in Engineering..

• Contextualized development of qualitative and quantitative research instruments

What follows are some of the questions that inspired his decision to pursue a doctoral degree in engineering education:

• What are sub-Saharan Africans’ perceptions of STEM education and how do these perceptions influence their policies and quality of life? 

• How can STEM education be used as a tool for the socio-economic development of sub-Saharan Africa?

• How can STEM educators in Africa most effectively develop, deploy and improve upon curricula, pedagogies, and pedagogical aids that will create self-reliant, critical- and inventive thinking scientists, technologists, engineers, and mathematicians capable of solving local and global problems existing now and in the future?

• Are current assessments adequate measures for evaluating the competency and knowledge required of intending and currently-enrolled STEM students? If so, what factors are responsible for so many first-class engineering graduates (especially women) leaving STEM fields in Nigeria and how do we improve the retention rates? If not, what assumptions, factors, and conditions are responsible for the supposed marginalization of STEM education candidates in sub-Saharan Africa?

• What are the oft-charted pathways of students from low-resource/conflict settings who successfully vie for and gain access to high-quality education?

Professional Experience:

• Co-founder/Head of Operations at STEM-Ed Africa (June 2014-present)

• Project Engineer at Anasami Construction Nigeria Limited (Oct 2014 - March 2016)

• Trainee Engineer/Gas Plant Operator at Nigeria Gas Company Limited (May 2010 - Nov 2010)

Education:

• Ph.D. Student in Engineering Education, Purdue University (2017)

  • Expected graduation date (May 2023)

• B.Sc. in Chemical Engineering, University of Lagos (2011)