Dr. Jumi Popoola is an experienced Molecular Genetics scientist with over a decade of experience in multidisciplinary fields, including research and biotech institutes. She has worked at The Institute of Cancer Research U.K. and The Royal Marsden Cancer Hospital in London, in collaboration with Merck KGaA, Germany. She designed and implemented screening assays, which enabled fast tracking of drugs into clinical trials for patient benefit.

She has also worked in Chevron as well as with Boehringer Ingelheim GmbH, to launch the drug Prostatonin into the Nigerian market, for the treatment of enlarged prostate (BPH). She is an active participant in the global drug discovery community. She is very passionate about making quality healthcare accessible to low- and middle-income populations, exemplified by her introduction of the low-cost, iBreast hand-held scanner for mammography screening in Nigeria.

Currently, she is the Vice President, Molecular Genetics and Biobank Operations at 54gene Inc., a health technology company focused on tackling the disparity in precision medicine by building one of the world’s richest datasets from the most genetically diverse populations in the world and applying deep analytics to derive key insights and bespoke solutions for Africans and other populations, from this unique data set.

She graduated from the University of Lagos, Nigeria with a BSc. in Medical Microbiology, as well as from the University of Sheffield, U.K. with both a Masters degree in Molecular and Genomic Medicine and a PhD in Molecular Genetics in Oncology