Olufunmilayo Olopade
Olufunmilayo I. Olopade (born 1957 Nigeria) is a hematology oncologist, Associate Dean for Global Health and Walter L. Palmer Distinguished Service Professor in Medicine and Human Genetics at the University of Chicago. She also serves as director of the University of Chicago Hospital's Cancer Risk Clinic. Life. Olufunmilayo Olopade was born in Nigeria in 1957 and was the fifth of six children born to an Anglican musician. She attended St Anne's School Ibadan for her secondary school education. Olopade first expressed interest in becoming a doctor at a young age because the Nigerian villages were scarce  for doctors and medical resources, which were both in high demand. She graduated from University of Ibadan, Nigeria, with a MBBS, in 1980. She works closely with the Breast Cancer Research Foundation and has performed extensive clinical work surrounding the role of the "BRCA1" and "BRCA2" genes in the incidence of breast cancer in women of African descent. She is a member of the American Association for Cancer Research, the American College of Physicians, the Nigerian Medical Association, the American Philosophical Society, and the Institute of Medicine. Awards. Olufunmilayo Olopade was one out of the three African-Americans to receive  the $500,000 award. This award was appointed by John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. This “no strings attached” stipend grant was given as support for up to five years and was referred to as the “genius grant.” This grant allowed Olopade to continue her research on her groundbreaking discoveries on diseases and health concerns. Family. She married Christopher Sola Olopade, also a physician at the University of Chicago, in 1983; they have two daughters, including journalist Dayo Olopade, and one son. Research. Most of her research was on the susceptibility to cancer, which would then be used to  adopt a more effective way of treating breast cancer among the African and African-American individuals and populations. In 1987 at the University of Chicago, she found a gene that helped suppress tumor growth. In 1992, Olopade helped found the University of Chicago's Center for Clinical Cancer Genetics. Here she found that African-American women often developed breast cancer at younger ages than white women. In 2003, she began a new study looking at breast cancer and genetics from African women from Nigeria to Senegal and also African-American women in Chicago. By 2005 she found that 80% of  tumors in African women did not need estrogen to grow compared to 20% of tumors in Caucasian women. She also found that this was due to a different pattern of gene expression between the African women and the Caucasian women.