Professor Ijeoma Uchegbu was made a Dame Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in the 2025 New Year Honours.
Professor Dame Ijeoma said, "I came into science simply because after training as a pharmacist I wanted something a little bit more challenging to do. I thought that being a researcher would be a great place to start. As I did my pharmacy degree at Nigeria's University of Benin, I did give research a try in Nigeria, but the infrastructure difficulties in the eighties made this virtually impossible. I came back to the UK, having emigrated 17 years earlier from the UK to Nigeria and started looking around for opportunities.
Professor Dame Ijeoma Uchegbu is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences; an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry; a governor on the Wellcome board - one of the largest biomedical sciences research charities in the world; a member of the Academy of Medical Sciences Council; and Chief Scientific Officer of Nanomerics Ltd.
In 2024, she was installed as President of Wolfson College, Cambridge having been elected to the position in November 2023. She becomes the 7th President at Wolfson, and is the third Black Head of House or College in Cambridge.
She has served as Chair of the Academy of Pharmaceutical Sciences and chaired EPSRC and Science Foundation Ireland grant prioritisation panels.
She served as the UCL Provost's Envoy for Race Equality, a role in which she led on race equality work at UCL. Her initiatives (e.g. Dean's Pledges on Race Equality) were instrumental in achieving UCL's Bronze Race Charter in 2020.
She has also presented to the UK House of Commons on the educational racial disparities that lead to a lack of ethnic minority representation in scientific research.