Nineteen-year-old Nigerian tech genius, Tomisin Ogunnubi, made history at the age of 12 when she worked on a school project to create a tracking app that shot her into national and international prominence. Since then, she has been part of super cool geniuses who are leaving huge blueprints in the tech space. At the age of 18 in 2021, she was part of 100 teenagers who globally won the RISE award.
She emerged as a winner along with five other brilliant Nigerian teenagers after going through a year-long process to assess their ability to work as a team on their project ideas. The competition started with 50,000 contenders with Tominsin making it through the first 1000 contestants to the last 100 who were selected by the panel, according to the BBC.
The former Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, with his wife Wendy, pledged $1 billion to support the grooming and nurturing of emerging talents like Tominsin and her colleagues, as reported by Forbes. As one of the 100 winners, Tomisin received a higher education scholarship, a chance to participate in a residential summit, funding for ideas on a competitive basis, network matching, start tech packages, and mentoring, according to rise for the world.
Tomisin is proudly one of the youngest Nigerian programmers, with a promising future in the tech space. She has had the opportunity to study at Oxford University on scholarship and also at the Imperial College, London, where she was part of a team that won the robotics competition organized by the US Embassy in Nigeria, according to authorpedia.
Tomisin started exhibiting her love for coding at the age of 12, and always aspired to use her skill to impact society positively. But she knew she could not achieve her dream without deepening her knowledge in diverse areas, and therefore made extra efforts to study web and mobile development, and apps that broadened her scope in several languages as well as frameworks such as JavaScript, Java, and Python. As curious as she is, she has also extensively researched machine learning, animation, and design. She currently works as a software engineer at Cascade, United Kingdom.
Tomisin is not only passionate about tech but makes time to explore other talents, including her intense interest in sports and music. She once ran a track for her school and won medals as a member of the school relay team. She also sang in her school choir and loves to play the piano. In 2018, she co-authored a book with her mother, Yewanda, titled “A Walk In Her Shoes”.