
Name: Amos Olagunju
Degree Plan: M. Sc. Computer and Information Sciences 1980
Current place of employment: St Cloud State University
What have you been up to since graduating?
I am presently a tenured professor in the Department of Computer Science and Information Technology at St. Cloud State University (SCSU) in Minnesota. I previously served as the interim dean of undergraduate studies for two years at SCSU. Prior to that position, I served as the dean of the School of Graduate Studies and chief research officer at Winston Salem State University in North Carolina. I served as the chair of the Mathematics and Computer Science Department, and later the Computing and Information Sciences Department, at Delaware State University (Dover, DE). Before that, I taught in the Asian Division at the University of Maryland University College, North Carolina A&T State University, and Michigan State University.
A faculty fellow and later a senior faculty fellow selected jointly by the American Society of Engineering Education and the Navy, I developed manpower mobilization and data-mining algorithms for monitoring the retention behaviors of personnel. As a member of the technical staff at Bell Communications Research (now Telcordia), I developed an architecture for a generalized C transaction environment, quantitative models for system workload projection and characterization, software metrics, and managerial decision support systems.
I have served as a Fulbright Computer Science Specialist Scholar in Uganda, and as an African Diaspora Information Technology Scholar in Nigeria. I have been an active member of ACM since 1980. I have been a reviewer for Computing Reviews since 2005, and have written over 170 reviews.
Do you have any stand out memories or stories from your time at Queen’s?
I will never forget the opportunities that Queen’s and the CIS Department provided for me. Queen’s and the CIS Department provided funds for me to pay my tuition, to live and learn. I had only 770 Canadian dollars when I arrived at Queen’s in 1978. We were treated like royal kings and queens at the Graduate Residence on campus. I still have my Queen’s field hockey jersey that I was given in 1978 when I played field hockey at Queen’s University. I will never forget all my exposures to theoretical aspects of computing, denotational semantics and probability theory by faculty members in the CIS and Math Departments at Queen’s. I will never forget riding bus free in Kingston and takin free ferry to Wolfe Island with Queen’s identification card. I remember the family friend that first hosted me when I arrived at Queen’s –I went hiking with the family for the first time in my life. I still have the pictures from Queen’s when I dressed like an astronaut even before the real cold started in 1978. It was at Queen’s that I saw the first snow!