About
In her five years on campus, Ololade “Lola” Akingbade flourished as an interdisciplinary researcher, a champion of social justice, and a respected and influential leader among her peers. A behavioral neuroscience major with a minor in sociology, Akingbade’s study and research in diverse fields have equipped her with multiple analytical lenses through which she aspires to reimagine medicine, making it fundamentally more fair and also more effective.
Akingbade is co-author on a scientific paper studying an Alzheimer’s-implicated microtubule protein; creator of TheBlackVoicesProject.com, a photojournalistic archive of overlooked stories of the lived experience of African-Americans in Ferguson, Missouri; and a contributor to a GIS project correlating income, race, and home values with aircraft noise pollution in Boston. Based on her experience leading a University Scholars Alternative Spring Break to Selma, Alabama, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the civil rights demonstrations there, she founded Northeastern’s chapter of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Teaching Tolerance on Campus campaign and co-founded Northeastern University Students Against Institutional Discrimination (NU SAID), a student coalition dedicated to making Northeastern diverse and inclusive. Akingbade was named a finalist for the Rhodes Scholarship.
Viewing healthcare as a social system in which she can be a voice for inclusion and justice, Akingbade will matriculate to the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine.
Ololade's Timeline
Pre NU
President of Debate
During high school in Bergenfield, NJ, Lola enjoys political debates, and became president for policy debate in her final two years of high school.
Year 1
Univeristy Scholar & Civic Engagement Student
Akingbade entered Northeastern as a University Scholar, member of the Honors Program, and participant in the Civic Engagement Program. In her first year, she began her studies in Behavioral Neuroscience. She also worked with St. Stephen’s Youth Program staff weekly to provide homework help to children.
Year 2
Working at Mass General and Publication
Lola took advantage of Northeastern’s unique experiential education model and worked full-time for six months at Massachusetts General Hospital Institute for Neurodegeneration, where she created a protocol for digital quantification of mitochondria motility in Alzheimer’s Disease and assisted in the mass expression and purification of the TauC3 domain variation of Tau, an Alzheimer’s implicated microtubule protein (work that resulted in being named as a co-author on a publication).
Year 2
Creator of TheBlackVoicesProject.com
Deeply affected by what she saw transpiring after the killing of Michael Brown by Darren Wilson (and the officer’s subsequent non-indictment) Lola conducted a Summer Scholars Independent Research Fellowship project that took her to St. Louis and Ferguson to interview African-American community members about their lived experiences and views on the local and national issue of policing, protesting, and understanding of political representation in the region. She developed TheBlackVoicesProject.com as an archive of those conversations.
Year 3
Taking on a Sociology Minor
She formalized her interest in social justice into a minor, and subsequently attended a study abroad in Cape Town and Johannesburg.
Year 4
Doing a Clinical Co-op
For her co-op at Acceleron Pharma, she supported a clinical team in patient communication and site management for neuromuscular disease drug trials.
Year 5
ROUTES Scholar to Team Leader
Akingbade went from a ROUTES Research Intern to a Team Leader with Northeastern’s Southern Poverty Law Center.
Post NU
MD at UChicago
She will pursue a Doctor of Medicine degree at University of Chicago.