The language of transformation: Meet Onyi Odumosu

Onyi Odumosu

Onyi Odumosu learns languages easily.  She speaks two Nigerian languages (Yoruba and Ebira), French, and English. 

“It’s true what they say – once you learn one language, it becomes easier to learn another, and another,” she says.

Odumosu is a new addition to the Finance Strategic Transformation Project Team, having joined the team in early September as Senior Project Manager.  Her 15+ years of project management and technical leadership experience will come heavily into play as UVA embarks on its financial transformation, but so will her multilingualism.

As she begins working on the project and communicating with our partners and stakeholders, Odumosu is prepared to learn new languages once more. 

“I’ve always been in positions where I’ve had to learn to communicate with people who come from a different area of expertise than me – to learn their language and connect,” she says.

Her skill at learning the language of project stakeholders and translating on behalf of the project and technical team has been a key part of her past roles, including the Epic implementation at UVA Medical Center and also in her work with UVA’s Emily Couric Cancer Center.

At the Cancer Center, Odumosu helped translate the data her team gathered into real-life changes that would improve patient outcomes.  As she looked at clinical data for a specific subset of patients, she realized that the data was telling them something specific about how to improve patient care.

“We realized that streamlining the pathway through the system, which involves many specialists, would improve their care and outcomes.  These were obvious fixes.”

Odumosu’s work at the Cancer Center also gave her a rare opportunity for a project manager – a chance to actually use the product she had helped deploy during her time at the Medical Center, an experience that added to her understanding of and consideration for end-users.

In addition to her depth as a professional, Odumosu has a wide background. She is originally from Nigeria, and is a world traveler, including trips to countries in Africa and most recently visited Sydney, Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris, and London.  She came by her love of language and her interest in connecting with different types of people honestly; she grew up traveling as part of her parents work and being immersed in different environments. 

She and her family relocated from Boston to Charlottesville six years ago when her husband took a faculty position in the School of Engineering.  Although she misses the wealth of different cultures she interacted with in Boston, she enjoys the ease of living in Charlottesville and the opportunities to enjoy nature. During her free time, she enjoys being on the soccer field with her two sons, cooking or catching up with news around the world. 

Although her background is certainly wide and varied, Odumosu says the thread that ties it all together is her love of working with people on big projects, and getting everyone to come together for a common, meaningful purpose.  She enjoys her work of building connections that enable people to work together.

“People are the same, so much the same,” she says, adding “We speak different languages, have different cultures, but at the very core, people are more the same than they realize.”
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Visit the online community to learn more about Onyi.