2021 UMEC Student of the Year

When Dunsin Fadojutimi was a child in Nigeria, she wanted to be a businesswoman just like her mother.
But her mom asked her what else she could do and she thought, "I like to solve problems." With that,
she thought about helping to find a solution to the unreliable power grid in her home country.Dunsin Fadojutimi

She moved to Baltimore in the fifth grade, and she attended Eastern Technical High School. At first, she
thought she would study business. But when she looked at possible majors, she recalls, "I read the jobs
engineers do, and I said, ‘Yeah, that's me.'" Electrical engineering was the logical choice for someone
who had dreamed of solving the problem of stable power generation in her childhood home.

She transferred to Morgan in 2019 because she knew she wanted to do research, and she quickly found a
home on the Urban Mobility & Equity Center (UMEC) team working on a robot guide dog.
"That was a different way of thinking," she said, adding that she enjoyed combining Bluetooth
applications and programming to solve a real-world problem.

From her work during that experience and a project focusing on Complete Streets, she was chosen as the
2021 UMEC Student of the Year and honored at the Council of University Transportation Centers banquet
on Jan. 8, 2022.

A member of the Zeta Phi Beta sorority and Tau Beta Pi (the engineering honor society) Fadojutimi is also
active in the National Society of Black Engineers, where she serves at the national level in special interest
groups on energy and transportation. She is also an Eisenhower Fellow and recently attended the
Transportation Research Board Conference in Washington, D.C. After graduation, she hopes to merge
electrical engineering and transportation, and continue pursuing interest in climate action and "working
with electric vehicles and connecting that to the grid. I see the growth path."

After a gap year, she plans to attend graduate school and hopes to earn a Ph.D. She also hopes to catch
up on a little sleep - she works three 12-hour overnight shifts at Amazon on Thursdays, Fridays and
Saturdays. She's a full-time Process Assistant, dealing with quality issues and monitoring data on human
errors in the workflow.

"I've learned a lot about time management," she says with a laugh.