Life Sciences student recognized on world stage

Life Science student, Oluwaseyi (Seyi) Jesusanmi, has been named as one of the top undergraduates in the World.

Seyi was highly commended in the Life Sciences category of the 2020 Global Undergraduate Awards. The competition, which aims to celebrate top undergraduate coursework and foster interdisciplinary collaboration between students and recent graduates worldwide.

Seyi, who came to Dundee from Blackpool and graduated this summer with a Neuroscience Honours degree, said, “I’m incredibly grateful to have received this commendation from the global undergraduate awards. It was a very large amount of work. But the support and encouragement I received from my wife, my family and my lecturers helped make it a very enjoyable experience.”

The submission to the awards focused on the work that he undertook in his honours project with Dr Ros Langston from the School of Medicine and Dr David Martin from the School of Life Sciences.

Seyi created an AI, now named NORMAN. The aim of NORMAN is to make the analysis of mouse behaviour faster, easier and more reproducible. With no formal training in computing Seyi had a steep learning curve ahead, but he developed a software tool that will save countless hours of researcher time, as well as improving the accuracy of the results. It allows an experiment known as the Novel Object Recognition Test to be performed in a rigorous and reproducible way, removing the variabilities of human judgement and reducing the need for so many animals in experiments. NORMAN will provide a great benefit to researchers worldwide who will no longer have to watch and score hours of video themselves.

His work on this project has already been recognised with the awarding of the Neurosciences Honours Prize at the 2019/20 School of Life Sciences Prizes. It was also voted the most inspirational project by his fellow students at the 2019 Honours Project Symposium.

Seyi’s project supervisors were delighted to hear about his achievement with Dr David Martin saying, “It has been an absolute pleasure to work with Seyi on his project. He is so motivated and innovative in his approaches, extremely thorough and always thinking many steps ahead. The project has been driven by him from the very beginning so his recognition in the Undergraduate Awards is well deserved. I am very pleased that Dundee has given him this opportunity to excel.”

Dr Ros Langston added, “I have been setting the mouse behaviour analysis practical for my level 3 students for a number of years but this is the first time one of the students has created a machine learning solution for it! Don’t tell the new students....!!! Seyi is incredibly motivated and insightful and it is fantastic to be able to include him in our Biomedical research community and see him flourish. I am really looking forward to collaborating on further projects with him. He is incredibly deserving of this award- huge congratulations are in order!”

Seyi will continue his work on NORMAN alongside undertaking an MSci project with Dr David Martin and Dr Ros Langston over the coming academic year, working to analyse brain waves (neural oscillations). “I’m also planning on developing the NORMAN system further so that lots of people are able to use it. In the future I’d like to help many neuroscientists through automating more analysis techniques,” explained Seyi.

The Global Undergraduate Awards is the world’s leading undergraduate awards programme which recognises top undergraduate work, shares this work with a global audience and connects students across cultures and disciplines. It is underpinned by the values of innovation, collaboration, ambition, impartiality, inclusiveness and efficiency. The organisers believe in empowering students and helping them to recognise the potential their undergraduate work can have in making real change.