Abraham Adeyemo: Animal lover turns to pathology to prevent future pandemics

This piece was written in the spring of 2025 by GRAD 5144 (Communicating Science) student Rebecca Martin as part of an assignment to interview a classmate and write a news story about his research.
Did you grow up loving all animals big and small, those loved and reviled, both household pets and those destined for your dinner table? Abraham Adeyemo is lucky enough to turn his passion into his profession.
Adeyemo is a second-year student at Virginia Tech in the Department of Biomedical Sciences and Pathobiology, where he combines an anatomic pathology residency program with a Ph.D. program. Pathology is the study of the nature, causes, and progression of diseases. It involves the examination of tissues, organs, and fluids collected through biopsies of living animals and through autopsies (called necropsies in animals) to gather information to better understand the disease.
It has been a long road for Adeyemo. His journey begins in Ibadan, Nigeria, when at age 10 he mistakenly rescued a crying bush rat from its nest and nourished it with milk from his lunch — only to witness its demise, exposed as it was to heat and separated from its mother. This experience inspired Adeyemo to learn more about animal care. After writing several highly competitive matriculation exams, and failing to gain admission into medical school, he eventually got an offer of admission in a veterinary medicine program at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria.
Although Adeyemo had never heard about veterinary medicine beforehand, he fell in love with the program, where he eventually studied both large animals such as cattle, horses, pigs, and sheep and small household animals such as dogs, cats, rabbits, and rats. Upon graduating, Adeyemo worked in the public sector, making house calls for these varied animals. He worked hard for two years, traveling all over Ibadan to take care of sick animals.

Adeyemo then joined a research institute and studied viruses in wildlife populations, specifically in bush meat, or hunted animals, which included African giant rats, squirrels, cattle egrets, and bats, to name a few. His job was to characterize viruses within this variety of animal species. It is critical for countries to know and classify viruses in their wildlife populations and track their potential to be transported across regions, he says. This became especially obvious after the COVID-19 human pandemic, which is believed to have originated in bats in Wuhan, China.
In this role, Adeyemo traveled throughout southwestern Nigeria, taking samples from humanely trapped small mammals and local kills to track specific viruses, such as the Lassa Fever virus, found in animals. This enabled the research group to track mutations in the virus and trace the virus’s lineage or family tree. His data allowed the isolation and mapping of the distribution of these viruses in the study area.
“The VT Biomedical Sciences and Pathobiology Department in the vet school was a natural fit,” says Adeyemo about his next move, “especially with the specialized training from the residency program.” He can combine his existing skill set from his veterinary medicine experiences with his passion for research. At Virginia Tech, Adeyemo joined Kylene Kehn-Hall’s lab, where his focus is unraveling the intricacies of how Rift Valley fever virus causes brain infection in humans. He studies this by recreating such brain infections in mice using a weakened form of the virus.
Brain infections from Rift Valley fever often result in permanent damage or death in humans, Adeyemo says. There is limited information on how this virus operates in humans to cause disease, since it has only sporadic, regional outbreaks. Thus, Adeyemo is looking at how the virus initiates infection, spreads in the brain, and causes damage in mice. He can then progress to investigating drug efficacy to prevent its damaging effects, mitigate severity of disease, or control infection entirely. Adeyemo hopes that his research will make the world a safer place.