Jimmy Adegoke
James O. Adegoke is an award-winning climate scientist and professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City where he served as Chair of the Department of Geosciences. He also served as an appointee of the Mayor of Kansas City Missouri on the city's Environmental Management Commission and has testified before the South Africa Parliament’s Portfolio Committee on Science and Technology and the Climate Change Committee of the Nigerian House of Representatives.
In the United States, he has testified at the United States House of Representatives for the United States House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming. He also serves on the Technical Advisory Board of several United Nations applied science programs, including the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization project on the application of remote sensing for water resources and ecosystem management in Africa.Background
Adegoke majored in Geography, with minors in Physics and Geology, as an undergraduate at Ahmadu Bello University. He attended the University of Ibadan, earning an M.S. in Geography, specializing in Climatology, and a Ph.D. at Pennsylvania State University, focusing on satellite climatology. He conducted research at the Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean at the University of Washington.
His work focuses on societal impacts of environmental change, including air pollution studies in rapidly changing mid-latitude urban areas, climate impacts on water resources in the Lake Chad Basin, and coastal ecosystem dynamics in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria. He is a member of several professional societies including the American Geophysical Union, Association of American Geographers, and American Meteorological Society. He is on the Advisory Council of the .
He had held research and teaching appointments at the Federal University of Technology Minna in Nigeria, Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado and the Earth Resources Observation Systems Data Center, in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. From 2010 to 2012 he served as the Executive Director of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research Natural Resources & Environment Division, in Pretoria, South Africa where he had concurrent appointment as Director of the Applied Center for Climate & Earth Systems Science, a Center of Excellence of the South Africa Department of Science and Technology Global Change Grande Challenge program. More recently, he completed a consultancy stint in 2017 as Interim Executive Director of the West African Science Service Center on Climate Change and Adapted Land Use. Before that, he served for two years on WASCAL's Governing Board and as Chair of the organization's Scientific Advisory Committee
