Oluwatoyin A. Asojo

Oluwatoyin (Toyin) Asojo is Associate Director for Inclusive Excellence at the Dartmouth Cancer Center. She was previously an associate professor and chair of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Hampton University and an associate professor of pediatrics-tropical medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine. Asojo works at the interface of math, chemistry, biology, and computation. She is a crystallographer with an interest in the structural studies of proteins from neglected tropical disease pathogens.

Early life and education Asojo was born in Oyo State, Nigeria, and spent her early life at the University of Ibadan Campus. She was a member of the Ibadan Poetry Club and volunteered at an orphanage while at school. Her father was a chief laboratory scientist at the University of Ibadan. She would spend several hours a week in the lab.

Research Asojo has conducted research in industry, academia, and government. After graduating, Asojo was appointed a postdoctoral fellow at the National Cancer Institute. At Baylor College of Medicine, she worked with the Texas Children's Vaccine Center and the National School of Tropical Medicine. She coordinated summer research projects for disadvantaged high school students through the American Chemical Society Project SEED. Since 2014, Asojo has been an editor for Nature's Scientific Reports and an associate editor specializing in crystallography for BMC Structural Biology.

Awards and honors

2016 - Society for Science & the Public Science Advocate Grant program

2016 - Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship in 2016.

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.(Cited 165 times, according to Google Scholar ) 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. (Cited 152 times, according to Google Scholar. ) 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. (Cited 116 times, according to Google Scholar. ) 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.