BABATUNDE A. OGUNNAIKE (1956-2022)

BY THOMAS F. DEGNAN JR.

BABATUNDE AYODEJI OGUNNAIKE, university administrator, professor, researcher, mentor, musician, athlete, coach, calligrapher, and poet, died on Feb. 20, 2022, after a courageous six-month battle with pancreatic cancer.¹

Born on March 26, 1956, in Ijebu-Igbo, Nigeria, to Adesijibomi Ogunnaike, an educator and administrator, and Ayoola Oduneye, a businesswoman and educator, Tunde was the second of their eight children and the couple’s oldest son. Known for his bookish, contemplative, and caring nature as a boy, Tunde was considered a prodigy, skipping two primary school grades. He excelled in mathematics and the sciences. Tunde attended the Government College Ibadan from 1966-72, where he was affectionately known as “Papa,” a nickname also given to his father, a notable alumnus of the same institution. There, Tunde excelled in both academics and music, playing bass for Sound Incorporated, a band that would go on to produce internationally renowned musicians such as Lágbájá.

A polymath, Tunde also distinguished himself as a painter, designer of clothes, and calligrapher — his elegant penmanship became one of his hallmarks. “Papa” was also a formidable athlete, playing competitive soccer and field hockey. He was a member of the 1977 Nigerian national field hockey team.

Tunde attended the University of Lagos from 1973 to 1976, earning a B.A. with first-class honors in chemical engineering. He completed his National Youth Service in Port Harcourt in 1977, where he responded to a call seeking contributions for a new national anthem. Part of Tunde’s submission was selected to be the second stanza of the current Nigerian national anthem:

Oh God of creation,
Direct our noble cause
Guide our leaders right
Help our youth the truth to know
In love and honesty, to grow
And living just and true
Great lofty heights attain
To build a nation where peace and justice reign

In 1978 Tunde traveled to the United States to pursue his Ph.D. in chemical engineering at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His advisor at the University of Wisconsin was Professor W. Harmon Ray (NAE 1991), with whom Tunde would later co-author a widely used textbook, Process Dynamics, Modeling, and Control (Oxford University Press, 1994). Tunde was also encouraged by Professor William G. Hunter to pursue graduate studies in statistics, which ultimately led to another encyclopedic textbook, Random Phenomena: Fundamentals of Probability and Statistics for Engineers (CRC Press, 2009), with Tunde as the sole author. Another lasting impact of his Wisconsin experience was that of excellent teachers, notably Professor R. Byron Bird (NAE 1969), whose guidance Tunde sought out and was instrumental in his becoming an outstanding instructor himself. Tunde received his Ph.D. in chemical engineering and a master’s degree in statistics from Wisconsin in 1981. He then joined Shell Research in Houston, Texas, for a year before returning to teach at the University of Lagos from 1982-88.

While in Madison, he met and fell in love with Anna Marie Denison, a musician studying education at the university. They married in 1983. Anna Marie moved to join him in Lagos the same year. They formed the popular gospel band Solid Rock and a Bible study group that the Ogunnaikes led in their home in Oshodi. The study group became quite popular and influenced the charismatic Christian movement in Nigeria.

Unhappy with the materials available to his students at the University of Lagos, Tunde wrote by hand and published Principles of Mathematical Modeling and Analysis in Chemical Engineering (Done Publishers, 1985) for his classes. During his tenure at the University of Lagos, he trained many students who would go on to have notable careers in various fields of engineering. When living conditions in Nigeria became too difficult, Tunde accepted a job as a researcher at the E. I. DuPont de Nemours Company. In June of 1989, Tunde, his wife Anna, and their sons Oludamini and Ayodeji, moved to Wilmington, Delaware.

Tunde worked for DuPont for 13 years. His area of expertise was process control. His contributions at DuPont included many improvements to the operability and optimization of the company’s distillation columns, polymerization reactors, extrusion, and particle formation. In addition to improving the profitability and safety of DuPont’s chemical plants, Tunde led research efforts in model predictive control and linear and nonlinear model identification. He was promoted to Research Fellow in 1995, achieving a level that many others required decades to reach.

While working at DuPont, Tunde remained actively engaged in the chemical engineering community, publishing in academic journals, presenting at many scientific and engineering conferences, and writing the aforementioned textbook on process dynamics and control. He was also responsible for DuPont’s first “industrial postdoc” and “visiting scientist” program in the field of process systems engineering. Launched by Tunde in 2001, the program had an incredibly broad impact, as the participants “graduated” and trained dozens of future Ph.D. engineers. A central scientific theme of this research program emphasized biological control systems as paradigms for generating new insights into the regulatory circuitry using systems engineering techniques. Under Tunde’s leadership, DuPont investigated numerous opportunities in reverse-engineering natural paradigms for novel industrial control techniques. Furthermore, Tunde and several of his mentees pioneered fundamental research in biology at numerous levels, including cardiovascular control, physiological signal transduction, and the emerging field of systems biology.

After teaching part-time in the University of Delaware’s Department of Chemical Engineering for several years, Tunde joined the faculty full-time in 2002, and in 2008 he was appointed the William L. Friend Chair of Chemical Engineering. Tunde was known for his humility and collaborative spirit. He often said, “Success is a shared game; certain successes can never happen unless you work with somebody else.” Tunde’s favorite maxim was, “If you want to go fast...go alone. If you want to go far...go together”; his long list of colleagues — students, faculty, and industry collaborators — who were his co-authors is testimony to how consistently he put this into practice.

Tunde’s research efforts at DuPont and the University of Delaware in systems dynamics, mathematical modeling, and process control continue to have profound implications not only in process engineering but also in fields as diverse as biology, bioengineering, medicine, applied mathematics, statistics, and chemical engineering. His highly cited work in Molecular Systems Biology on the ErbB signaling network² combined experiments with modeling to develop a model for how various proteins are regulated in cancer — a critical achievement. As he faced the prognosis of pancreatic cancer, Tunde worked together with his physicians at Johns Hopkins University as part of his experimental trial, monitoring his own physiology and analyzing the data with his theoretical methods.

A consummate scholar, in addition to his four books, Tunde authored over a hundred publications in major academic journals. He served as associate editor of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology and associate editor of the American Chemical Society’s Industrial & Engineering Chemistry. Tunde received many awards for his research, teaching, and leadership, including the Warren K. Lewis Award of the AIChE (2022), the UD College of Engineering’s Excellence in Teaching Award, and the University of Delaware’s Medal of Distinction (2021) — the university’s highest nonacademic award. In recognition of his contributions to the field of process control, Tunde received the Computing Practice Award from the Computing and Systems Technology Division of AIChE (1998), the ISA Donald P. Eckman Education Award (2007), and the AACC Control Engineering Practice Award (2008) for “pioneering the application and implementation of model predictive control, nonlinear state estimation, nonlinear control, and product control to polymer and granulation processes.” The Control Engineering Practice Award was renamed the Babatunde A. Ogunnaike Control Practice Award in his honor in 2023. In addition to being elected to the NAE, he was elected to the Nigerian Academy of Engineering in 2012, the U.S. National Academy of Inventors in 2014, and to the rank of fellow in the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2016. He was also a fellow of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers. The University of Delaware, with sponsorship from DuPont, has established an annual lecture series in his honor — with the inaugural lecture planned for the spring of 2025.

Tunde frequently returned to Nigeria, where he worked to improve graduate and undergraduate education in engineering. As an affiliate faculty member at the African University of Science and Technology (AUST) in Abuja, Nigeria, he spent his sabbatical in 2019 teaching at the University of Guyana. Tunde was passionate in his belief that engineers should solve global human problems and focus on changing the world for the better. His love of teaching also drove him to make practical and interdisciplinary experiences essential to training engineers to prepare them to make significant global impacts.

Tunde served as interim dean for the University of Delaware’s College of Engineering from 2011-13 and dean from 2013-18. In honor of Dr. Ogunnaike’s seven years of service as dean, the university established an annual college lectureship in his name as well as the Babatunde Ogunnaike Global Engineering Student Enrichment Fund. The fund is structured to provide financial assistance for students to engage in meaningful global activities, such as an Engineers Without Borders service trip, a study abroad program, or international research supporting a new entrepreneurial venture.

Tunde is survived by his beloved wife, Anna; sons, Oludamini, Ayodeji, and Olumakinde; daughters-in-law, Naseemah and Stacy; grandchildren, Jibril Oluwasanumi, Sakinah Ayokari, Anuoluwapo Liliane, and Babatunde Baxter (whose name means “the father has returned”); and siblings, Iyabo, Segun, Seun, Dupe, Yomi, Seyi, and Wole. His sons have each carried forward his academic legacy: the eldest is a professor at the University of Virginia, the middle son is a professor at McGill University, and the youngest completed his Ph.D. in theoretical physics at MIT and is now doing research as a post-doctoral fellow at UC Berkeley.

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¹Mark Barteau (NAE), Karen Bloch, Francis Doyle (NAE), Eric Kaler (NAE), Abraham M. Lenhoff, Tony Liu, Senyo Opong, Levi Thompson (NAE), and Norman Wagner (NAE) contributed significantly to the development of this tribute.
²Birtwistle MR, Hatakeyama M, Yumoto N, Ogunnaike BA, Hoek JB, Kholodenko B. 2007. Ligand‐dependent responses of the ErbB signaling network: experimental and modeling analyses. Molecular Systems Biology 3(1):1-16.