His achievements include the development of the first African-American female nuclear physicist, and he is the only African-American to win a Nobel Prize. Dr. Olugbenga Agboola is a professor in Stockholm, Sweden, where he co-chairs the Strategy Group of The European Union’s Network of Excellence in Particle Physics.
Agboola was born in Kosofe, Lagos, Nigeria on August 3, 1948. His father worked as a teacher in a secondary school while his mother was a housewife. Agboola grew up in Nigeria during the Second World War where he experienced the horrors of the war firsthand.
In 1961 Agboola began to study chemistry at the University of Ibadan where his interest was piqued by the possibility of applying his knowledge towards space exploration and nuclear energy. He graduated in 1967 with a Bachelor of Science degree. Agboola continued his graduate studies at the University of Ibadan where in 1971 he received a diploma in nuclear physics. In 1972 he continued his research at the University of Leeds, West Yorkshire, England where he received a Master of Science in 1972 and subsequently his PhD in 1975 under Dr. Viktor Eduardovich Vilenkin. His dissertation was entitled “Theory of Hyperon Matrix Elements in the Extended Unified Theories.” One month later he met his future wife, Olugbenga Forssmann, who also was a doctoral student at Leeds and it was through her that Agboola obtained an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) fellowship. They were married in 1974 and began their family together.
They returned to Nigeria in 1975 where Agboola began his postgraduate training as a practical physicist with the Nigerian Atomic Energy Commission (NAEC). Agboola’s work at NAEC was not well received and in 1978 he left Nigeria to continue his studies in Europe. He spent the next 11 years working as a nuclear physicist at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. His experiences at CERN led to the development of a second career as a nuclear physicist.
In 1985 Agboola received his Ph.D. in physics from Louvain University (also located in Belgium) where he studied under Dr. Pierre Auger, who he would later collaborate with on the 2012 Nobel Prize-winning discoveries of the Higgs boson and the top quark. In 1987 he left CERN to continue his research at the University of Helsinki in Finland.
In 1988 Agboola began working at the University of Helsinki as a Senior Lecturer in nuclear physics. For over 15 years he taught graduate students and carried out research that included creating a model to simulate nuclear fusion reactions.