Lab to Leadership: How Chemical Engineering PhD Candidate Stephen Adepoju Learned to Build Stronger Teams
Stephen Adepoju, PhD’27, chemical engineering, decided to focus his research on improving the drug delivery system to help deliver cancer drugs in the human body due to a personal experience he went through years prior. His time in the LEADERs Program helped strengthen his skills and expertise to be able to pursue his research successfully.
Stephen Adepoju, a fourth-year chemical engineering PhD candidate at the College of Engineering, spends his days building computational models of lipid bilayer mixtures, which are the thin membranes that make up a protective barrier around all our cells. He is designing what he calls “softer balloons” to carry life-saving drugs more effectively through the human body. Adepoju’s research focus on enhancing drug delivery isn’t just academic; it’s deeply personal. Experiencing the tragedy of losing his grandfather to blood cancer in 2020 prompted Adepoju to specifically pursue a PhD focusing on biochemical means to help deliver cancer drugs more effectively.
He also collaborates with experimentalists at Northeastern University to support and validate the computational models he builds, which he can then use to test these balloons of varying softness to get a sense of how effective they are in delivering drugs to the body. Part of his research currently targets embedding drugs into liposomes to treat blood cancer, the same type of cancer that claimed his grandfather’s life. Recently, the lab to which he belongs won a new research grant, allowing him to expand his computational work toward better understanding how materials form and transform at the molecular level. While he embraces this new direction in his research, Adepoju remains committed to his core mission: “I want to ensure that people don’t get to be in the condition my grandfather was in a few years ago and help change people’s lives.”
While he knows that his research is invaluable, it was the skills he developed through the LEADERs Program that helped him navigate the chaos of assembling a large team and events in a leadership role. When Adepoju took the first LEADERs course, “Leading Self and Others,” he had no idea how quickly he would need to apply what he learned. Almost immediately after completing the course, he stepped into the role of President of the African Graduate Students Association (AGSA) at Northeastern University. “I learned the stages of team formation: forming, norming, storming, and performing,” Adepoju explained, referring to Tuckman’s Stages of Group Development that is taught in the LEADERs course. Tuckman’s model posits that all four stages are necessary for a team to effectively grow, face challenges, solve problems, plan, and deliver results. The experience of taking the class immediately before assuming a leadership role in AGSA tested everything he had learned about team dynamics and building trust in leadership.
As someone who describes himself as “a real goal-getter,” Adepoju initially struggled when team members didn’t match his pace in completing tasks. “When I gave my team tasks and saw that they weren’t performing, I wanted to take it from them and do it myself,” he recalled, “but I remembered clearly from the course that one attribute of a very good leader was trust in your team members.” That lesson in trust proved transformative, because by learning to step back and rely on his team, Adepoju and his AGSA leadership team were able to organize what became “literally the largest gathering of African graduate students across the whole of Boston in 2025,” with multiple schools in attendance and a turnout that exceeded all expectations.
Adepoju also highlighted another part of the LEADERs course that helped him tremendously, the industry interview assignment, which tasked students with talking to a leader in an industry position to better
understand how they came to be in that position. Even the process of finding a leader to interview opened Adepoju’s eyes to all the possibilities beyond academia. By reaching out to CEOs and other heads in pharmaceutical, consulting, and biotech industries, he began to see how his computational research could translate into real-world impact. He stressed the value of the industry interview, “You get to meet people in the industry, learn from them, and build very important relationships. The best time to build relationships is when you don’t need them.”
As Adepoju enters his fourth year of PhD studies, he already sees opportunities emerging from the relationships he built during his LEADERs Program industry interviews. The program has fundamentally changed how he approaches both his research and career trajectory: “It has shaped my relationships in a very nice way,” he reflected. “The course helped me understand that not everybody would be like you, not everybody would be focused on getting things done in the same way. That understanding made me a better leader and a better researcher.” Whether he is running simulations to create softer liposomes for drug delivery or leading and organizing student events, Adepoju continues to apply the same principle: trust in the process, have patience with the journey, and practice unwavering focus on the ultimate goal of helping others to succeed, which will in turn, make one successful. For a student whose research aims to build better delivery systems for life-saving drugs, it is fitting that the LEADERs Program has enhanced his ability to serve as an effective conduit for knowledge, mentorship, and community building.
Upon completion of the “Leading Self and Others” course, LEADERs program staff and partner companies select fellows who align with specific industry needs. PhDs are supported through the fellowship application process and placed in a specialized role to solve a problem in industry. They go on to earn a LEADERs’ Experiential PhD leadership certificate, with guidance from an industry mentor and faculty advisor. The program is run by the PhD Network, which helps prepare students to enter the workforce as impactful researchers.
Source: PhD Network