Olagoke Olabisi

Olagoke Olabisi (AKA Lagoke Labisi) is an author, editor, educator, mentor, inventor, and entrepreneur. A Nigerian–American chemical engineer, Olagoke is the Chief Consultant and CEO of Infra-Tech consulting LLC, an energy consulting company focused on corrosion and materials engineering. He has 9 patents and a total of 97 publications including Fugacity and Vapor Pressure of Non-Polar Liquids at Low Temperatures, Thermoplastics Beyond the Year 2000: A Paradigm, and Handbook of Thermoplastics, 2nd Edition. He has been involved in academia and industry in the United States, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait. He is a mentor to students and young professionals.

Prior to 1990, gel-casting of ceramic powders was a continuing cooperative research program. between Allied-Signal Aerospace Company and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). As a visiting consultant with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory during the summer of 1990, Olabisi had an invention disclosure (ESID No. 917-X) relating to the program, which involved the use of a variety of water-soluble monomers. The results were subsequently subsumed in the patent entitled Method for molding ceramic powders using a water-based gel casting.

By 1989, the devaluation of the Naira forced an economic quandary on Nigeria. Olabisi was appointed the managing director, UNILAG Consult, University of Lagos. In response to the economic climate, he organized the National Workshop on Economic Recovery Program. He also initiated activities on Baseline Ecological Studies of the Niger Delta Basin; Soil Maps of Nigeria; and assisting the government's ongoing Delivery of Technical Aid to Equatorial Guinea. His activities at UNILAG Consult earned Olabisi a special award for dynamic, innovative, and result-oriented leadership in August 1990. Olabisi was the Founder and CEO of the African Biographical Centre LTD, Publisher of Who's Who in Nigerian Universities and Research Institutes.

In response to the global events, the new Lagos State University (LASU), established in 1985, decided on having a comprehensive engineering program and Olabisi was appointed the Foundation Dean of the Faculty of Engineering, Technology, and Environmental Sciences (FETES) in 1987. Aside from establishing the traditional departments, Olabisi established a department of polymer technology, the first such department in any Nigeria university. An award of the Association of Commonwealth Universities (ACU) Senior Traveling Fellowship enabled him to establish a fruitful linkage with the University of Adelaide resulting in LASU receiving an equipment donation worth more than a million dollars in 1988.

Olabisi received a PhD degree just prior to the 1973 oil crisis which dramatically drove up the price of crude oil, petrochemicals, polymer, and plastics. An immediate plastics industry response to the crisis was to focus on plastics material conservation. There arose the need for plastics processes to employ less than a full density of plastics material in producing light-weight automotive and other plastics material articles having structural properties matching or exceeding those of solid (full density) plastics articles. While employed at the R&D Department of Union Carbide Corporation Olabisi earned eight patents that addressed the conservation issue. The two key process patents are: Process for the molding of plastics structural web and the resulting articles and Structural foam molding process.

Following the impact of 1973 oil crisis, the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) was established (1977) and, in the same year, Nigeria joined OPEC as the 11th member country. A fully-fledged petrochemical complex was in operation in Nigeria in the early 1980s when Olabisi was appointed a professor of Chemical Engineering, University of Lagos. The need for teaching, research, and public service in petrochemicals, plastics, and polymer materials engineering was high in the country. Olabisi initiated courses and research for a PhD program in petrochemicals. Through his adjunct professorship and other linkages with the University of Akron and Case Western Reserve university, he was able to secure opportunities for some students to earn postgraduate fellowships to pursue PhD in the two universities. These graduates eventually became professors, executives of government parastatals, or captains of industry.

In spite of the 1973 oil crisis and the 1979 oil crisis, the petrochemicals organizations in the OPEC countries, including SABIC, still depended on licensing third-party process technologies to fulfil their resin needs. One of the ways SABIC sought to reduce or eliminate the dependence was to initiate a research program at the Research Institute, King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals KFUPM, Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. In 1990, Olabisi was appointed a professor and Senior Research Engineer at KFUPM. His activities in the SABIC-sponsored program resulted in a joint patent entitled Catalyst and process for ethylene oligomerization. His subsequent activities as a Consulting Engineering Specialist at Saudi Aramco earned Olabisi a 2003 Saudi Aramco Certificate of Recognition for Outstanding Achievements in Engineering & Operations Services. He had a number of publications exemplified by some key articles.

Olabisi proceeded to the University of California, Berkeley where he earned MS degree in chemical engineering in 1971 with a thesis entitled "Secondary and Primary Normal Stresses, Hole Error, and Reservoir Edge Effects in Cone-and-Plate Flow of Polymer Solutions", whose results were published in an article with the same title. He furthered his studies and earned a PhD degree in macromolecular science and engineering at Case-Western Reserve University in 1973, with a dissertation entitled Pressure-volume-temperature properties of amorphous and crystallizable polymers and oligomers (which is cited in an associated journal article) under the tutelage of Robert Simha. In 1980, he earned an MS degree in engineering management at the New Jersey Institute of Technology through a part-time self-development program.

Born in Osogbo, Osun State, Nigeria on 25 September 1943, Olabisi had his secondary school education at Ibadan Boys' High School Oyo State and proceeded to Government College, Ibadan, where he completed his advanced high school education in 1964. He was a 1965 recipient of a scholarship award from the African Scholarship Program of American Universities (ASPAU) administered by Africa-America Institute (AAI), to study Chemical Engineering at Purdue University, Indiana. In 1969, he graduated with two degrees: one in chemical engineering and the other in industrial management. He was the recipient of The John Clarence Lottes Award as an outstanding chemical engineering senior student and his senior project was published.