Award winning Tony Kabilan Okeke, 21, the 2018 Nigeria National Petroleum (NNPC) Science Quiz Champion, graduated on June 13, 2024, from Drexel University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States of America (USA), bagging double degrees of Bachelor of Science, B.Sc., and Master of Science, M.Sc., in Biomedical Engineering with summa cum laude – First Class with the highest Distinction – in both degrees.
Tony left the shores of Nigeria in the fall of 2019 for United States of America where he enrolled in a 5-years-accelerated program for dual degrees of Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.) and Master of Science (M.Sc.) Biomedical Engineering with a concentration in Bioinformatics (M.Sc.) and Neuroengineering (B.Sc.) in the School of Biomedical Engineering, Science & Health Systems, Drexel University. From the fall of 2019 till the summer of 2024, he was listed in the Drexel University Dean’s list in recognition of his academic excellence.
Drexel sources said, “Beside being very outspoken and ever ready to offer suggestions to make analysis more efficient, Tony’s academic journey in Drexel has been exemplary. He consistently achieved top grades, illustrating his deep understanding and innovative application of complex concepts in data structures, algorithms, bioinformatics, and machine learning. His insatiable curiosity and passion for learning new technologies, algorithms, and programming paradigms are evident in the projects he’s worked on. Tony would always go beyond the course requirements to explore cutting-edge techniques in bioinformatics and machine learning.
A notable example of his applied learning and innovation is his development of a sophisticated machine-learning pipeline across Quantitative Systems Biology and Machine Learning courses. In this project, Tony’s objective was to predict biological functions (“Gene Ontology Enrichment”) from genome-wide transcriptomic data. To this end, he processed 11,000 RNA-sequencing datasets through a custom differential expression pipeline, utilizing Google Cloud computer resources to leverage parallel computing for more efficient processing. His methodical evaluation of multiple models and careful tuning of model parameters to optimize performance were exceptional. The significance of this work was further recognised by the USA Society of Toxicologists when, on invitation by the Society, Tony flew into Salt Lake City, Utah, USA, where he made abstract presentation of the work during the session on Bioinformatics at the Society of Toxicology, SOT, 63rd Annual Conference from March10 to 14, 2024.
Tony and his Senior Design Team developed a novel machine learning algorithm to aid in treatment planning for patients with traumatic brain injury (TBI). They submitted an abstract and a poster on this work to the 50th Annual Northeast Bioengineering Conference, NEBEC, April 4 – 5, 2024, in Hoboken, New Jersey, United States. NEBEC, a premier gathering in the field of bioengineering, fosters collaboration and showcase innovative research and education programs in North Eastern United States. Accepted as an innovative research, NEBEC on 5 April, 2024, selected Tony and his team to present a poster on this work during the poster session of the Conference.They worked on this project in collaboration with Moberg Analytics (a startup, developing software to aid Neurosurgeons in monitoring and treating traumatic brain injury (TBI) and Dr. Dmitriy Petrov (a neurosurgeon at Penn Presbyterian Medical Centre). The algorithm they developed identifies past patients similar to an inputted patient and predicts the likelihood of the inputted patient developing secondary injury (a key indicator of the long-term trajectory of TBI)
Beyond his academic course work, Tony excelled and showcased his outstanding talent in high impact industry research internships, some sort of real world experience, in some establishments in the United States of America which included the Ivy league University of Pennsylvania, UPENN, the multinational Pharmaceutical giant, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and others. Publishing extensively as first-author and co-author on several publications as well as multiple abstracts at Scientific Conferences, he became versed in integrating Biomedical Engineering domain expertise with rigorous computational analysis to advance pharmaceutical research.
Some of his most notable accomplishments were made during his internship in 2020 at Penn Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, UPENN, USA, at the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic where he was engaged in investigations of biomarkers for immune activation and neuro-injury in acute COVID-19 infections. His work contributed to enhanced understanding of immune responses, organ failure and the impact of anti-viral treatments in COVID-19 patients, and resulted in his publication of high-impact papers on Covid-19. He also presented the work at the Critical Care Congress Meeting/Conference of the USA Society of Critical Care Medicine in Puerto Rico between April 18 to 21, 2022. His work investigating temporal biomarker changes and immune responses in Covid-19 patients in 2020 is remarkably impactful for a young undergraduate student.
As an intern in Non-Clinical Safety Research at GlaxoSmithKline, GSK, Collegeville, Pennsylvania, USA, sources said he was instrumental in developing a multitude of data analysis packages and helped to advance GSK data science that enabled the GSK laboratory to investigate mechanisms of toxicity, using new platforms being developed by GSK scientists.
On AI (Artificial Intelligence) in healthcare,Tony founded Meddibia, an interdisciplinary team, during the 2023 Philly CodeFest hackathon in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA, which developed an AI-powered iOs application, envisioning diagnostic assistants that provide reliable and interpretable guidance to augment the decisions of healthcare workers for healthcare delivery in undeserved communities especially in developing countries. As the project lead, he developed machine learning solutions to power core functionality. This included training a classifier to predict diseases from lists of symptoms. Additionally, he utilized transfer learning to adapt a pre-trained ‘Convolutional Neural Network’ to identify skin lesions by training on over 15,000 images across 23 skin disease. This project, out of the 40 entries that competed in the Philly CodeFest hackathon, emerged the winner of Philly CodeFest Collaborative Team Award, one of the top prizes in the hackathon, affirming the innovative nature of their approach and showed, firsthand, how machine learning models can augment clinical diagnostics and make healthcare information more accessible.
In May, 2024, Tony’s Meddibia team came tops in the Startup Fund Competition organised by the Charles D. Close School of Entrepreneurship, Drexel University. The competition provides non-dilutive grants, mentoring, investor introductions and incubation services to the winner for their startup ventures. Speaking on the award, Tony said, “The journey to the tops in the University Startup Fund Competition involved a rigorous multi-stage selection process. We submitted a detailed application focusing on market analysis, including target customers, market size, and competitors, outlined our problem statement, product development plans, revenue models, and estimated costs to bring the product to market.
From the application pool, 21 startups/competitors were selected to proceed to the first round of pitches on May 16, 2024, via a comprehensive 4-minutes pitch presented to the panel of judges via zoom by each competitor. Eight (8) competitors/startups made it to the final round.
In the final pitch of 10 minutes span allocated to each competitor, we addressed potential market entry obstacles, our mitigation strategies, both technical and user adoption-related, showcased demos of products, and discussed customer acquisition and retention strategies, concluded with an interactive discussion that addressed the judges’ remaining concerns. Hours later, news came that we were tops in the startup fund competition; we won the award for the Spring of 2024!”
Tony’s scholarly achievements and contributions to the advancement of knowledge in Biomedical Engineering are already being noted by some institutions in the United States. On December 3, 2021, he was inducted into the USA National Engineering Honor Society, Tau Beta Pi (TBP) because of the distinguished scholarship shown in his academic achievement and exemplary character of personal and professional integrity as a student. In the Spring of 2023, he won a research award: Genetic Toxicology Technical Committee (GTTC) Professional Development Award for Genetic Toxicology Workstream from Cross Industry Consortia, the Washington DC based Health Environmental and Safety Institute (HESI) focusing on Emerging Systems in Toxicology.
Again, in the winter of 2024, he was honoured with a nomination for full membership of the interdisciplinary Scientific Research Honor Society, Sigma Xi, a society founded in 1886 with more than 200 Nobel Laureates, in addition to others, as members. Tony’s nomination letter states that his membership of the society distinguishes, and recognises, him as an exceptional contributor to the research community.
Tony’s most exceptional qualities extend beyond his academic and technical prowess. He demonstrated maturity and leadership rare for his age, co-founding and spearheading student organisations like Drexel Computational Design (DCD) and mentoring peers. The group provided students with peer tutoring for programming courses . As a tutor, he assisted students who struggled with introductory programming classes, covering basics including data structures, algorithms and their applications in Biomedical data analysis. His approach helped foster an engaging, inclusive environment, and helped students grasp intricate programming concepts. The DCD was recognised as the New Student Organization of the Year, 2022, a testament to their collective impact on their peers.
