Experiencing new ways of life

Olatunji Mumini Omisore came to China in September 2015, when he started his PhD program at the University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (UCAS). “After obtaining my master’s degree at the Federal University of Technology Akure in Nigeria, I wanted to try something new. I applied for the doctoral degree to study and develop new control systems for minimally invasive flexible surgical robots under the Pattern Recognition and Intelligent Systems curriculum at UCAS,” said Dr. Omisore. He attended courses for four months in Beijing to study some basics needed for his dissertation.

Dr. Omisore felt nostalgic at first as he met and studied with students from different parts of the world. Since it was the first time to leave his home country, he had a lot of mixed feelings during his early days in Beijing. Having to learn a new culture, try new types of food and adapt to a new climate compounded these feelings. Two months after his arrival in China in September 2015, the management of IC-UCAS gathered a group of international students and taught them several beautiful Chinese songs, which not only relieved Dr. Omisore from classroom stress but also won the group the Gold Award in the annual intra-school singing competition in December 2015.

As time went by in Beijing, everything got better. “I really like the life in China and some of my friends moved to the south after graduation,” said Dr. Omisore, “The Institute of Biomedical and Health Engineering (an affiliated institute of the Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology (SIAT) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS)) enjoys a stellar reputation worldwide, so I wanted to find teachers there to supervise my PhD dissertation.”

In 2019, he graduated from UCAS with a PhD degree in Pattern Recognition and Intelligent Systems and immediately started his postdoctoral research at CAS’s SIAT in Shenzhen, China.

Experience of working at SIAT

Upon his arrival in Shenzhen, Dr. Omisore wondered how he could travel around the city by using its ever-busy metro system. To put it simply, he felt completely overwhelmed! Dr. Omisore was worried he’d never make new friends and get first-hand experience in Shenzhen. Three months later, he realized that he had managed to familiarize himself with different aspects of the metropolitan city and could speak enough basic Chinese for his daily life in China. Looking back on the past year, Dr. Omisore can see himself evolve into a better version of himself who is able to handle many things that otherwise seemed difficult when he first came to Shenzhen. The city has given him the chance to experience life in a big city with people from all over the world who come from far and wide and often stay around for a short time either to take on exciting jobs or engage in exchange programs.

Dr. Omisore playing with kids during his visit to Hefei to attend the 2019 Vision and Learning Young Scholars Seminar [IMAGE: DR. OMISORE]

A major challenge during Dr. Omisore’s study at CAS’s SIAT was using lab equipment/software designed in the Chinese language. However, this turned out to be an advantage for him as through attending lab meetings in Chinese he was able to master many words in Chinese and communicate with his colleagues.

As professionally advised by his supervisor Professor Wang Lei, who is a researcher at SIAT, he started his postdoc by writing fellowship and grant proposals that could support his research initiative. Among these funding programs is the CAS President’s International Fellowship Initiative (CAS-PIFI), a special funding program initiated to attract different types of foreign talent to CAS for scientific studies, research cooperation and exchange program.

“Besides CAS-PIFI, I applied to many other projects at that time, and succeeded in obtaining acceptance from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) and the Shenzhen Natural Science Foundation (SNSF),” said Dr. Omisore, “It was a great honor and gave my career a wonderful start that made me stand out among my peers who had completed PhDs in my research field.”

Dr. Omisore’s CAS-PIFI research focused on reducing global mortality from cardiovascular diseases. In associated studies, he developed new learning- and physics-based control strategies for image-guided surgical robotics navigation. This includes control strategies that learn data and statistics and use them for intelligent navigation and teleoperation control, methods for vessel/tissue segmentation and tool tracking in medical images (MRI/CT/X-ray), and a multimodal data-guided strategy that he pioneered for surgeon-robot catheterization with task-specific autonomy during cardiac interventions. In addition, he demonstrated the models’ usability with carefully designed case-based in-vitro and in-vivo studies.

“My CAS-PIFI project identified that intelligent control systems driven by machine learning strategies can offer effective navigation and teleoperation control of flexible robots during intraluminal interventions,” said Dr. Omisore, “I noticed many research gaps that need to be explored for bench-to-bedside translation of robotic intervention.”

For instance, he discovered that machine learning could enhance intravascular interventions with provision of patient-specific morphological and functional data analytics and standardized applications for seamless multimodal data fusion. He was also the first to develop intelligent image-guided robotic technology.

“I always work until late at night, and go back to my apartment with the moon already high in the sky,” said Dr. Omisore, “This doesn’t bother me at all because my career in science helps me stay enthusiastic in life and I never feel lonely.”

During the four years of the PIFI program, Dr. Omisore published and presented 35 research articles in top-ranked journals and at various conferences. These efforts have earned him an accumulated ~1,000 citations with an H-index of 16 on Google scholar.

Moreover, he won several awards including the Excellent International Graduate of UCAS in 2019, IEEE-IES in 2017 and TWAS-Elsevier travel grants to participate in international conferences and workshops in 2019.

“I was selected to participate in the 8th Heidelberg Laureate Forum held in Heidelberg, Germany in 2021,” said Dr. Omisore, “the annual forum brings together the most exceptional young mathematicians and computer scientists worldwide to meet Nobel Laureates for scientific interactions and networking.”

Thoughts about China, campus life and supervisor

China has recently become the fastest growing country in the world. Of course, this is awesome yet at the same time requires everyone to keep up with a fast-paced life. Shenzhen is a city that is filled with good people and boasts nice weather, which makes work, especially at CAS’s SIAT, really fantastic.

“It has been amazing working with Professor Wang Lei,” said Dr. Omisore. “He is committed to sparking novel ideas from students and staff and he provides concrete support for them to put thoughts into action despite already leading multidisciplinary studies in biomedical engineering.”

Dr. Omisore attends a signing ceremony of the joint laboratory. [IMAGE: SIAT]

Group photo with SIAT foreign friends in Shenzhen Fairy Lake Botanical Garden [IMAGE: SIAT]

Currently, he is working on Flexible Surgical Robotics and Artificial Intelligence with several projects running concurrently. This provides a solid platform for him to gain the diverse academic and professional experiences required so he can work independently as well as learn to be a smart leader and an effective team member. Thus, working at the Research Center, and at SIAT in general, helped him open up several research works that remain interesting and important for the existence of humanity.

Working at CAS’s SIAT involved frequently staying up late in the lab but living in China has also offered many avenues to gain pleasure and leisure time.

“I participated in UCAS International Students Ping-Pong Competition for fall semester of the 2015/2016 academic year,” said Dr. Omisore, “and I won the second place in the Men’s Doubles event.” And he remained a good winger in football through sticking to his hobby during leisure time while in Shenzhen. He has participated in the inter-school competitions in Shenzhen every year since 2016 and won second place in the 2017 football competition with the SIAT football team.

Source: Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology (SIAT),

Chinese Academy of Sciences