Sunday A. Adetunji, MD is an OSU graduate student in epidemiology, a physician–scientist, hospital founder, and global maternal health researcher.
From personal loss to global impact
College of Health student works to save mothers and babies worldwide
When Sunday A. Adetunji, MD, was young man, medicine was not an abstract science but rather the fragile line between life and death. He lost two siblings to sickle cell disease and watched a cousin die during childbirth. From that tragic experience, he switched his major from engineering to medicine and made a promise to himself to reduce preventable deaths.
“Family experiences changed everything for me,” he says. “That is when I knew what it was to have pain.”
Today, his promise has evolved into research at Oregon State University, where he is a second-year PhD candidate studying epidemiology with a focus on maternal and reproductive health. He had four options of where to pursue his degree, including NYU and Georgetown, but says OSU felt like home.
“It’s a very cool environment. This place has a kind of tone and setting that no matter where someone is coming from, they have help fitting into the culture.”
His journey from Nigerian physician to hospital founder to OSU graduate researcher is a story of how personal grief can inform science and medicine that protects millions.
Building solutions from the ground up
While training in obstetrics and gynecology at Obafemi Awolowo University in Nigeria, Dr. Adetunji saw the same patterns emerge in its crowded labor wards and operating rooms: Women arriving too late to save themselves or their babies, babies dying inside facilities that should have been safe, and families pushed into grief or poverty by events that were, in principle, preventable. It was there he decided he didn’t want to work within existing healthcare systems. Instead, he would build a new one.
In 2017, he founded Alifort Hospital, a multispecialist center designed around one radical belief: No woman should die giving life because of where she was born or how much she can pay.
When the hospital opened its doors, he served as ER driver, lab tech and consulting doctor. He even drove his patients home after giving birth. As it grew, others joined his team and delivered emergency obstetric care, provided surgical services to underserved communities, and ran outreach programs to identify at-risk mothers before emergencies developed. Every safe delivery reinforced his conviction, but also raised a bigger question: How could the lessons from one hospital change outcomes across entire countries and even the world?
That question brought him to OSU’s College of Health, where he works at the intersection of clinical care, data science, and global health policies and addresses the critical moments where healthcare systems succeed or fail.
Conducting research with impact
Although his projects, outlined below, span different diseases and continents, they share a common purpose: Find the exact points where systems fail and lives can be lost or saved, turn those moments into data, and use that data to redesign systems so the next patient has a better chance at a healthy life.
At OSU, he’s working to map surgical access in Nigeria. His national cohort study examines which mothers receive timely surgery when needed and how care patterns determine newborn survival in the critical first days of life. This work gives health ministries concrete strategies to reorganize referral networks and surgical capacity.
Other research projects he has planned outside the university includes:
- Analyzing how much facility-based birth coverage is needed before maternal deaths decline, and whether those gains reach everyone or only the privileged
- Understanding how pregnancy intention, life circumstances, and healthcare access interact to determine preterm birth risk
- Examining whether rapid diagnostic pathways used to rule out heart attacks in primary care are safe for historically vulnerable groups such as women and people with diabetes
- Investigating whether public health financing reforms protect families from catastrophic medical costs, or if the benefits remain only on paper
- Exploring whether pregnancy risks can be detected before blood pressure spikes or organs fail
After his expected graduation in 2028, he plans to continue driving change in maternal death in Nigeria, which is 50 times the rate in the United States.
What began as private grief has become an international research agenda for Dr. Adetunji, who is rewriting the odds for mothers, babies and patients who have historically been left behind. As he puts it: “I turn the stories of mothers, babies, and patients into data, which hopefully creates a better story for the next family.”
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