Prof. Francisca Onaolapo Oladipo

Director Research, Innovation, Consultancy and Extension

Francisca (‘cisca) Oladipo is a Professor of computing and Director –Research, Innovations, and International Relations at Kampala International University. She is also a Professor and served as former Head of the Department of Computer Science at Federal University Lokoja, Nigeria, and a past member of the University’s Governing Council.

Francisca obtained a PhD in Computer Science in 2010 and was a 2014 Spring Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Electronics and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, USA under the TOTAL-MIT Empowering the Teachers Initiative. She is a Grace Hopper Faculty Scholar and a fellowship alumna of several International Programs including the Heidelberg Laureate Foundation Germany, United States Department of State Exchange Program (TechWomen), Internet Engineering Task Force, the Women of Color in Computing, Widening Natural Language Processing, Women in Machine Learning, Black in Artificial Intelligence, German Scholars Organization, etc. She is a two-time recipient of the PyCon USA Grant, a recipient of the ACM FAT 2019 Fellowship and the 2019 Diversity and Inclusion Fellowship of the ICML. She is a recipient of the GitHub Universe In addition, she is a Fellow of the Africa Scientific Institute and member of several local and international professional and scientific associations including the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, European Alliance for Innovation, British Computer Society, Nigerian Computer Society, Computer Professionals (Registration Council) of Nigeria, the Global Internet Governance Academic Network, International Association of Computer Science and Information Technology, the Internet Society, Diplo Internet Governance Community, The Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.

She is an alumna of the prestigious Machine Learning Summer School and have been trained in Machine Learning, Big Data Analytics and Data Science at the Institute of Analytics and Data Science, University of Essex, UK, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Madrid, Spain and the University of Oxford.

In addition to developing innovative curriculum for multidisciplinary research, Francisca is bridging the gaps between research and practice in the areas of Theoretical Computer Science and she has published numerous papers detailing her research experiences in both local and international journals and presented research papers in several international conferences. She is also a reviewer and editorial board member of many international scientific publications.

Francisca is currently leading the Team responsible for setting the Research Agenda for Kampala International University and garnering more international linkages to enable co-operation with foreign institutions in many areas including research and exchange programs for staff and students’ development. Her approaches desire to promote and facilitate leading-edge research, including collaborative and interdisciplinary research, in order to meet the goals of KIU through growing a community of innovative thinkers and researchers who are desirous of solving problems both on a global scale and within the immediate environment.

Outside of daily work, she designs programs to increase the participation of females in the fields of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM).