Spend 10 minutes with Funmi Olopade and you wonder if there’s a single word that might best capture her curious, compassionate nature.
“Genius” worked well when the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation honored Olopade with one of its grants in 2005 for her work on the link between genetics and breast cancer, particularly in women of African ancestry.
But even that seems limiting for this world-renowned oncologist and genetics expert.
Her business card from the University of Chicago Medical Center serves as a crowded testament to some of Olopade’s accomplishments: “Walter L. Palmer Distinguished Service Professor, Departments of Medicine and Human Genetics. Director, Center for Clinical Cancer Genetics. Director, Hematology/Oncology Fellowship program.”
Oh, and add “associate dean for the school’s Global Health Initiative,” a title conferred on her last year.
If that seems daunting — a balancing act between Olopade’s love of clinical work with patients and her laboratory research — it is.
But those who know her say the physician-scientist is well-suited for that role, with the energy and smarts to complete almost any task.
“It all comes together for her to be a leader, but more important, an independent forward-thinker. … If Mars were open, she would have made the trip,” said Dr. Harvey Golomb, a professor of medicine and dean of clinical affairs at the U. of C., who interviewed Olopade when she applied for a fellowship there. “And she has a wonderful personality.”
“To whom much is given, much is expected,” said Olopade, a wife and a mother of three. “Every day I wake up and thank God that I am alive because I can do so much to help people.
“I have patients who call who are in the deep, darkest moment of their lives — when they’ve just been told they have breast cancer — and they come to see me and I say, ‘Well, let’s put our heads together and see how I can help you.’
“And I am in a place where not only (can I) influence how people are shaping their research, but I can influence how others think about diseases that they don’t see.”
The office of Dr. Olufunmilayo Olopade — Funmi, for short — in the new Gwen and Jules Knapp Center for Biomedical Discovery at the University of Chicago, has a serene, breathtaking view north to the city’s skyline.
But the office of this powerhouse is in a state of flux. She moved in less than a month ago. Paintings lean against walls waiting to be hung. A credenza is filled with family photos of her husband, Dr. Christopher “Sola” Olopade, and their children: Feyi (who is working in Nigeria), Dayo (a journalist in Washington, D.C.) and Tobi (a finance student at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania).
Things more pressing than picture-hanging fill her agenda. There is a series of 24 weekly seminars on global health and medical ethics that kicked off this week. There are doctors in Chile and Japan to confer with, patients to see and a graduate student waiting in the lab.
“I said, ‘What’s going on? It’s Friday,'” said Olopade, recalling the conversation with the student. “And she said, ‘I have great results that I have to share with you,’ and I can’t wait to go and listen to her. The great results — we don’t know where it’s going to lead to but every time you do an experiment, you try an idea and you follow through with it and something new comes out of it. It’s just amazing.”
Olopade joined Chika Nwachukwu, 24, in the laboratory, where the student — who had been working on a gene-and-protein project for a month — proudly held up a square of film patterned with black marks. “That’s a great gel,” said Olopade to the beaming Nwachukwu.
“If I can influence one student to decide (to) love medicine, then that is great,” she said. “That’s a life transformed.”
Funmi Falusi was born 52 years ago in Nigeria to the Rev. John Falusi and Dorcas Falusi, the fifth of their six children. Her parents (her mother, 90, lives in Nigeria; her father died in 1992) nurtured a compassion for others. “We learned early on in life (that) if someone came into the house we had to feed them.”
Her father also believed his children should be educated and “get to the best place they can get to,” she said. “As a girl growing up in Nigeria in a male-dominated society, any time I was in the car with him he would always say, ‘Well, look at that woman driving her own car. You’re going to be driving your own car too.'”
She headed to medical school, despite a disdain for biology. “I like to help people and I didn’t see the connection between what we were doing in the preclinical work — which was all science-based and just in the classroom.”
Her mother urged her on: “She said, ‘Don’t worry. When you get to see patients, it will be nice.’ And it was true.”
At medical school in Nigeria, Olopade — always a sports enthusiast — would tag along with one of her brothers to his cricket games, eventually becoming scorer. It was there she met cricket player and fellow medical student Sola Olopade.
Funmi and Sola began dating after medical school, got engaged, then took fellowships in the United States and were married at Chicago’s St. James Cathedral, the Episcopal church on Huron Street. “All our children were baptized there. They became our family away from home.”
“We are lucky we have common interests,” said Sola, a U. of C. professor of medicine and clinical director of the Global Health Initiative. “We have a global perspective and we care about people. And we believe strongly in academia.”
These days, when they’re not globe-trotting to visit their children or spending several weeks working with medical schools in Nigeria, you may find them biking along the lakefront. “I used to play squash with him,” Olopade said. “He always wanted to win so I stopped playing with him.”
Funmi Olopade arrived in Chicago in 1983 as a resident in internal medicine at what was then Cook County Hospital. It was there she saw many young women with breast cancer. “I kept thinking, ‘This is so similar to Nigeria. Why is it so similar to Nigeria? What knowledge would make me really have a better handle on the cancer problem?'”
She began a postdoctoral fellowship at the U. of C. in 1987.
“When I came to the University of Chicago, Dr. (Janet) Rowley was blazing the trail in terms of her work in cancer genetics. I wanted to be just like her. “
“I went to Dr. Rowley and I (asked) if she could mentor me,” said Olopade, who joined the U. of C. faculty in 1991. “That is when I started doing the genetics research, and it gets you to begin to think of ancestry. … And I just thought, ‘Boy, I wonder what the types of breast cancer in Nigeria were like. I wonder how we could study Nigerian women.'”
It was during a trip to Nigeria that she met a breast surgeon who said doctors there had been collecting information. “My colleagues were writing a lot about Ashkenazi Jewish women. We could track some of these mutations dating back centuries. And I just thought we ought to now begin to do the story of the Nigerian breast cancer patients and to see how we can do cross-continent collaboration.”
About the same time, Olopade met Dr. Mary-Claire King (credited with discovering the gene that linked heredity to breast cancer risk) at a conference. King told her, “You’re a doctor, go back and if you can help us find families so we can really nail this disease down, we can understand it better.”
Olopade agreed and suggested developing a clinic in Chicago to collect data on families with cancer histories. In 1992, she became the founding director of the U. of C. Center for Clinical Cancer Genetics. The Global Health Initiative began in 2008 with her appointment.
These days, her focus is on “personalized medicine” with an assist from technology. “We used to think one size fits all,” she said. “And now we actually have the technological tools to look at how to develop drugs so we give the right drug to the right patient for the right ailment.”
And that, she believes, dovetails nicely with her latest role.”There are some things that we do exceedingly well in this country and there are some things some other people do very well, better than we do, and so we can learn by opening our minds and opening our eyes. … With technology, the world is so flat. Today I have talked to people in Tanzania. I can talk to collaborators in U.K. and Australia. We can all share best practices and learn from one another. And that’s really what medicine is now and that’s what’s really exciting now.”
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jhevrdejs@tribune.com
Cancer information: The American Cancer Society is one of the oldest and largest volunteer health agencies in the U.S. It provides information at cancer.org and offers a toll-free 24-hour hot line for cancer questions at 800-ACS-2345.
Share your story: Join our “Surviving Beautifully” forum at healthkey.com/forum, where breast cancer survivors and their loved ones can share their stories in an effort to give others hope, encouragement and suggestions.
Talk the talk: The words used in a breast cancer pathology report can be confusing. Go to the Celebrity Talking Dictionary at breastcancer.org to hear words pronounced and defined by the likes of Celine Dion and Tom Brokaw.
