Dr John Olajide Akanni is a Lecturer in the Department of Mathematical and Computing Sciences at KolaDaisi University, Ibadan, Nigeria, where he also serves as Acting Dean of Student Affairs. He works in mathematical epidemiology, building compartmental and fractional-order models of infectious diseases that heavily affect African populations, including malaria, Lassa fever, Mpox, human African trypanosomiasis, cholera, and Ebola. His work combines optimal control theory, sensitivity analysis and cost-effectiveness analysis to compare intervention strategies and guide the use of limited health resources. He has published in journals including Nonlinear Dynamics and Scientific African.
He holds a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Universitas Airlangga, Indonesia. He has held research fellowships at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford, as an Africa Oxford Initiative (AfOx) fellow, and at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (IHES), France. He has taught undergraduate mathematics for more than ten years.
As an Iso Lomso Fellow at STIAS (2027–2029), he is working on the project “Living with disease: Rethinking endemicity and the mathematics of ‘Permanent Epidemics’ in African contexts.” The project asks how models can describe diseases that persist in communities for decades, rather than treating them as outbreaks that end.