Professor Jimmy Adegoke
Professor Jimmy Adegoke is a renowned climate scientist, consummate teacher, public intellectual and global policy advisor on environmental management.
He is a naturalized American citizen and served as Chair of the Department of Geosciences (now Earth & Environmental Sciences) of the University of Missouri-Kansas City, USA, from 2008 to 2010.
He is a protégé of renowned scholars including Professor Emmanuel Oladipo who taught his first climate course in the Department of Geography, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria; Professor John Michael Wallace, former Director of the Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Oceans (JISAO) at the University of Washington, Seattle, who invited him to take up residence at JISAO as a visiting scholar in 1993; his dissertation advisor, Professor Andrew Carleton, at The Pennsylvania State University, Geography Department; and his postdoctoral advisor, Professor Roger Pielke Sr., at the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere
(CIRA), Colorado State University (CSU) where he spent two years as a NOAA Postdoctoral Fellow before accepting a tenure track faculty position at the University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC) in 2002.
Prof. Adegoke has helped to build a first rate research program at UMKC supported with millions of dollars in funding by agencies such as NASA, US National Science Foundation (NSF) and the African Development Bank.
Over the last two decades, he has built impact-focused multidisciplinary environmental research teams, advised governments across Africa, managed national and regional intergovernmental organizations and most recently worked as an advisor and senior consultant with the African Development Bank Group (AfDB) from March 2020 to August 2020.
An international consultant, Prof. Adegoke has had the singular honour of being invited to address the Congressional and Parliamentary committees in the United States of America, Nigeria and South Africa, on climate change impacts, policy implications and response strategies. He also served as interim ED/CEO of the West African Science Service Centre for Climate Change and Adapted Land Use (WASCAL), from April to December 2017.
He served as ED of the Council for Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR), Natural Resources & Environment Division, Pretoria, South Africa, from 2010 to 2012.
Prof. Adegoke’s work spans the climate science and policy spaces across multiple continents. In 2014 he was invited by the government of Nigeria to serve as Chair of Ministerial Advisory Committee on Agriculture Resilience which was commissioned by the Fedral Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development. He has had the honour to serve as an appointee of the Mayor of Kansas City, Missouri-Kansas, on the City’s Environmental Management Commission.
