Olivia Muoka is no stranger to excellence. As the best graduating student of the University of Calabar, Nigeria, (2023), a multi-scholarship winning academic, a successful podcast host and now the first winner of the inaugural Oxbridge African Scholars Summit.
The challenge was presented: share your research in three minutes. How do you take work compiled during weeks of fieldwork, months of laboratory experiments, or years of archival collection and whittle the findings down to just a three minute presentation? Well, undaunted, eighteen Oxford and Cambridge students stepped up to this challenge and presented their research at the inaugural Oxbridge African Scholars Summit, hosted at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge on February 22, 2025. All the presentations were engaging and demonstrated a breadth of knowledge across a myriad of subjects.
In the words of the first-place prize winner, Olivia Kamsi Muoka, ‘[w]hat really stood out to [her] was the exchange of ideas [and] hearing from other researchers tackling big challenges in their own fields. There was so much energy in the room, and it reminded [her] why platforms like this are so important.’ She stated that it was a space dedicated to ‘showcasing our work’ and where attendees were actively ‘learning from each other, building networks, and shaping the future of African research together.’
Muoka is currently reading for an MPhil in Medical Sciences and researching at the De La Roche lab at the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute. Her cancer research has been equally fueled by frustration, curiosity, and determination.
As she stated, she has ‘always been fascinated by the immune system’ and has often mused on ‘how it can be our greatest defense but also cause [the greatest] problems when things go wrong.’
Though experiments are not always successful, and setbacks are a constant reality, she has been ‘[l]earning to stay patient and adapt,’ and she says that her ‘supervisor, post-docs, and colleagues have been amazing in helping [her] navigate the ups and downs, and that has made all the difference.’
The hard work she and her colleagues have been putting into their research was showcased in her winning presentation entitled ‘How a Pathway Named Hedgehog Could Transform Immune Therapies’.
The indecipherable jargon of biochemical pathways is known to lull the non-scientific mind to sleep, but Muoka surmounted this with an ingenious analogy. She compared the pathway to a traffic light sequence. When properly functioning, it signals to cells when they should either stop growing, repair damage, or take a rest stop—essentially, like traffic flow, cell growth should be well regulated. However, as traffic signal failure results in road accidents, the equivalence of Hedgehog pathway malfunction on the cellular level may result in cancer cell proliferation and/or immune system dysfunction. Muoka’s research, therefore, focuses on how manipulating the different signals regulated by the Hedgehog pathway could eventually lead to breakthroughs in immunotherapy.In her words, ‘[t]he goal is to see if tweaking [the Hedgehog] pathway could lead to new treatments for immune disorders and cancers.
‘The idea that my research could one day help real patients is what keeps me going, it keeps me working in the lab late at night, striving to find solutions and being a creative thinker.’
Her passion was evident to the audience, and they were impressed at her ability to synthesize the complexities of such a vital pathway in three minutes. And for this reason, along with taking first place overall, she also won the audience choice award. What a well-deserved accomplishment!
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