It was an ambitious project for a budding oil engineer in Nigeria. Obasesam Okoi – just weeks out of college then – had been tasked with performing a topographical land survey of an oil mining site. His technical training in civil engineering had provided ample schooling for the assignment, but this new grad quickly realized that his education hadn’t fully prepared him for critical questions he’d face on the job.
Upon arrival at the oil field, he witnessed a local community in distress. Flow stations were releasing hydrocarbon gases into the atmosphere, endangering public health. Oil and gas pipelines had greatly interfered with local water resources. And nearly everyone in the area was living in abject poverty.
“That trip began to do something inside me,” Okoi said. “As an engineer, I wasn’t trained to think critically. But I started asking myself, ‘What is going on here? Why is this community living in such remarkable deprivation, even though there are vast reserves of oil and gas?’”
As questions piled up, Okoi’s experience in the oil industry awakened a lifelong passion for social justice. And now, two decades and five college degrees later, he is teaching a new generation of engineers to think critically about the world around them.
Empowering future engineers
As an assistant professor of justice and peace studies at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota, Okoi teaches courses on public policy analysis, advocacy and conflict resolution. Although he is on faculty with the College of Arts and Sciences, in a true full-circle moment, he also spends considerable time with budding peace engineers at the School of Engineering.
St. Thomas has been a leader in peace engineering for two decades, and it’s one of the reasons why Okoi was attracted to joining the university in 2020. Since arriving in St. Paul, he’s helped coordinate the peace engineering minor, which is designed to bring peace studies analysis and engineering technical skills together to find the best ways for engineers to advance the common good.
“My job is to help engineers bring more empathy and more critical thinking to their studies,” Okoi said. “With my students at St. Thomas, I empower them to raise critical questions about privilege, power and the impact of what we are doing at every stage of the engineering process.”
Okoi will co-teach a course in spring 2025 titled Engineering Peace, which aims to introduce St. Thomas students to peace engineering as a career path. Peace engineers might work on projects that involve artificial intelligence, renewable energy, public safety or agricultural tools that fight poverty and hunger.
Dr. Brittany Nelson-Cheeseman, a professor of mechanical engineering, is collaborating on the course and believes St. Thomas students will benefit from Okoi’s unique perspective.
“He’s just an amazing linchpin to helping engineers learn how to produce lasting change,” Nelson-Cheesman said. “He understands both sides of the problems: the technical aspects, but also those greater contextual pieces that are going to make sure that the innovations we’re putting forward are real solutions.”
Fulbright-Hays scholar
After leaving the oil industry in Nigeria, Okoi went on a decades-long search for knowledge, fine-tuning his critical thinking skills while amassing a half-dozen degrees ranging from international development, political science and international public policy, as well as a doctorate in peace and conflict studies from the University of Manitoba.
His quest for learning hasn’t ended.
Most recently, Okoi spent five weeks in Tanzania as a Fulbright-Hays Scholar, studying how urban and rural communities are responding to climate change. In the shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro, he met with local farmers and participated in sustainable farming workshops. Nearby in Arusha, he listened to Maasai communities grappling with the impacts of a changing climate.
Other stops included Zanzibar, where Okoi collaborated with environmental NGOs to gain insights into ecotourism and marine ecosystems. In the bustling city of Dar es Salaam, he toured solar energy projects and engaged with local inventors developing renewable energy solutions using recycled materials.
Okoi is already incorporating case studies from his summer 2024 trip into his St. Thomas courses.
“Innovation is something that is ubiquitous, it’s literally everywhere. We just need to find it and harness it,” Okoi said.
Mechanical engineering student Quinn Skelton ’28 enjoyed learning about Tanzanian ingenuity and indigenous innovations in Okoi’s Global Social Policy course. They are now planning to work together to study engineering solutions to security issues like kidnapping and human trafficking.
“Dr. Okoi helped change the way I think about global issues, whether that’s climate change or fast fashion,” Skelton said. “And as an engineer, I’m now motivated to think about all the possible ways that I can create solutions to fix real-world problems.”
Giving global issues broader context
With a passion for social and environmental justice, Okoi has become an in-demand international expert on conflict resolution and environmental peacebuilding. He’s returned to Nigeria multiple times to access post-conflict peacebuilding, as well as hold leadership summits on critical consciousness.
This past summer, he led a special session at the 18th annual Engineering, Social Justice and Peace Conference at Chalmers University in Sweden. His lecture, “How Engineering Skills and Methodologies Can Be Applied to Peacebuilding,” guided engineers and non-engineers in an activity designed to merge technical thinking with peacebuilding.
“The beauty of all of this is the fact that I’m not just doing this as a social scientist,” Okoi said. “I’m actually getting to interact with engineers and helping them to see the world differently.”
At St. Thomas, peace engineering courses contribute to degrees in any engineering field, including civil, computer, electrical and mechanical. And the credits required for the peace engineering minor also double as university core curriculum requirements, allowing students to pursue the minor without taking any additional classes.
“It’s a unique opportunity in the engineering world to have this kind of training available – to put a student’s technical training into a broader context,” Nelson-Cheeseman said. “And then to have faculty like Dr. Okoi, we hope students feel inspired and that they can see themselves doing this kind of work.”
Living out his vocation
As a coordinator of the peace engineering program, Okoi focuses on teaching students how to see the value of community to find commonality. He empowers engineers to collaborate with communities on decisions that will enable a new, brighter future.
“If people are going to be beneficiaries of our work, they must be contributors to that design,” Okoi said.
With each lesson, he is acutely aware that his career has come full circle. And, two decades after feeling ill-prepared to ask questions as a civil engineer, it’s now his responsibility – and great joy – to teach a new generation how to start asking their own.
“I feel really, really empowered to be living my vocation,” Okoi said. “What I’m doing gives me hope for a better world.”
