She became an academic expert in energy and natural resources, and she finds joy in others’ success
Age: 39
When Agatha Ojimelukwe moved with her husband and two children to Edmonton from Nigeria in 2019, she applied for a service coordinator job with an IT company. The president of Tier 3 IT Solutions took one look at her resumé, which included a PhD and science faculty positions at the University of Port Harcourt, and said, “Wow, you are overqualified. Why are you applying?”
“I was honest with him,” says Ojimelukwe. “I still had a lot to learn about the new place my family and I were calling home.”
While working, she studied policy planning and program evaluation at the University of Alberta, doing volunteer research and collaborating with local and international professors for a project related to vaccine hesitancy at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Ultimately, all that hard work paid off — Ojimelukwe is now dean of the School of Energy and Natural Resources at NAIT. “I derive a lot of joy and accomplishment from supporting other people and seeing them succeed,” she says. “I never want my work to be just another day job. I want to do something meaningful.” She also volunteers as the Chair for the Canadian Hydrogen Association’s Innovation Committee, where she advocates for clean energy policies.
And in her everyday work, she makes an impact in the community through experiences like Energy Natural Resources Week. The first event saw nearly 400 high school students come through NAIT, participating in hands-on labs, learning about programs and unlearning commonly held myths. The second year, the event was even better, she says, with companies, other departments at NAIT and industry partners wanting to collaborate with the now annual event.
“I love to see that difference,” Ojimelukwe says. “When we show up, and choose to act, we can create wonderful things together.”
This article appears in the November-December 2026 issue of Edify
