Faith Lola Olusesan

I grew up between two worlds. My parents came to the UK from Africa when they were young, carrying with them the histories, cultures and connections that shape who I am. When I went back to the motherland, I saw something I could not unsee. The inequality was not just there. It was here too. In the science. In the research. In who the tools of genomics were built for and who they were not.

Studying biomedical science and later bioinformatics made one gap increasingly difficult to ignore. African and diaspora communities hold extraordinary genetic diversity, yet remain underrepresented in the datasets used to understand human variation and develop genomic tools.

That matters because representation shapes what science can discover, how confidently results can be interpreted and who benefits from the next generation of genomic medicine. The communities contributing the most genetically are often benefiting the least.

That felt wrong. It still does. And it became the reason to build.