Opeyemi Olabisi, MD, PhD '09
Rising Star – Scientific Investigator Award
Albert Einstein College of Medicine
Dr. Olabisi is a 2009 graduate from the Einstein MSTP program. He completed his undergraduate education at The City College of New York, graduating summa cum laude with a degree in Biology. His research focused on the role of serotonin5HT2A and 5HT2C receptors in the actions of cocaine in the nucleus accumbens. Based on the quality of his work, Dr. Olabisi was awarded the Jonas E. Salk Award, one of CUNYs most prestigious undergraduate research awards, in addition to several other awards. He also received the Arthur Ashe Jr. Award for outstanding academic and athletic achievement. Dr. Olabisi performed his PhD thesis research in the laboratory of Dr. Chi-Wing Chow in the Department of Molecular Pharmacology, focusing on elucidating a novel pathway for the regulation of immune responses. Dr. Olabisi’s thesis research was published in five papers, including two first author papers. He received a five-year award of a prestigious NIH MARC Predoctoral Fellowship.
Dr. Olabisi was chosen as one of the two student representatives on Einstein’s MSTP Admissions Committee. Several students were admitted to the MSTP who, in part, owe their positions to Dr. Olabisi’s comments. Following graduation from Einstein, he completed residency training in Internal Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. He completed Nephrology fellowship training in the MGH-Brigham & Women’s Hospital. Dr. Olabisi did a postdoctoral research fellowship with Dr. Martin Pollak studying the mechanism by which variants of ApoL1 increase the risk of developing chronic renal failure. He was awarded a prestigious Harold Amos Medical Faculty Development Award from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in 2016. In 2019, he was the recipient of the competitive NIH Director's New Innovator Award. He was recruited to the Duke University School of Medicine in 2019, where he is currently an Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Division of Nephrology and a member of the Duke Molecular Physiology Institute. In 2020, Dr. Olabisi was chosen to receive the Whitehead Scholars Award. Dr. Olabisi is a role model for his ability to successfully achieve the goals of the MSTP training program. He is poised to make major contributions to our understanding of the molecular basis of kidney disease that particularly affects the African American community.