Founder/CEO at iLLUMANIA

Dr. Macaulay is a native of Lagos State, a 150 Fellow of the Royal Commonwealth Society (RCS) in the UK, a Resident Fellow of the Nigerian Global Affairs Council (NIGAC), and a 2021 Carrington Youth Fellow.

He holds a B.Tech. degree with First-class (Hons.) in Biology from the Federal University of Technology, Akure (FUTA), Nigeria in 2010, and went on to win the prestigious Commonwealth Scholarship twice! The awards enabled him to acquire his M.Sc. degree (with Distinction) in Sustainable Environmental Management at the Natural Resources Institute (NRI), University of Greenwich (UoG), the UK in 2013, and a PhD degree in Environmental Geochemistry and Geomicrobiology from the University of Manchester (UoM), the UK in 2019. He is currently a Lecturer, specialising in Ecotoxicology/Environmental Management in the Environmental Biology and Public Health Unit in the Department of Biology, FUTA. In September 2019, he was appointed as the Secretary of the Academic Board of the Department. 

Dr. Macaulay is an astute academic with a penchant for excellence. This he clearly demonstrated by earning himself the pioneer recipient award for the Best MSc Thesis on the Sustainable Environmental Management programme at the NRI, UoG, UK, for the 2012-2013 session. The award-winning MSc Thesis reviewed the challenges of cleaning-up crude oil spills using bioremediation strategies; here, he proposed a hypothetical bioslurping-biosparging technology for a synergistic, cost-effective clean-up of contaminated land subsurface, which he has since published in a peer-reviewed international journal, Annals of Environmental Science. He was also a three-time Judge (from 2013 to 2015) for The Queen’s Commonwealth Essay Competition organised by the RCS. 

From 2015-2019, through his PhD research focused on understanding the factors driving arsenic release in drinking aquifers, he developed novel in-situ deployment techniques for on-field groundwater arsenic studies which became fundamentally useful for the execution of a UK-funded arsenic project in Cambodia, worth about £600,000. A public communication of this novel technique earned him the “Best Poster Presentation Award” at the Annual Postgraduate Research Conference of the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, UoM, UK, in December 2018. 

On the 1^st January 2018, Dr Macaulay founded iLLUMANIA (www.illumania.org), an online educational consulting outfit, where he leads a team of Consultants and Administrators to provide academic support to students graduates and business professionals at affordable rates. Of all the services rendered, “scholarship application lens” is the most patronised. In the last 4 years, iLLUMANIA has produced over 130 MSc/PhD scholarship winners from Nigeria, Ghana, Cameroon, Kenya, Botswana, and South Africa; attracting about US$8 Million in scholarship benefits. This feat recently earned him the Royal African Award  presented by the Ooni of Ife, Oba Adeyeye Enitan Ogunwusi Ojaja II, and Nigeria’s Federal Minister of Youth and Sports, Mr. Sunday Dare. 

In 2021, he won 3 additional scholarships (the Nigerian University of Technology and Management (NUTM) Scholarship in Nigeria; Orange Knowledge Programme (OKP) Scholarship in The Netherlands; the Linkoping University-Biogas Research Centre (LiU-BRC) Scholarship in Sweden) worth 25 Million Naira to further improve his competence in technology and environmental sustainability.