Dean’s Profile Profile

Biography

Professor Azeez, Adesina Lukuman is now the Dean of the Faculty of Communication and Information Sciences. He was once the coordinator/head of the Department of Mass Communication, the position he occupied from August 2009, a few months after he joined the Department till August 2012. Indeed, his appointment as the coordinator/head of the Department, after the sudden death of the pioneering Head of the Department, was a test of his leadership capacity, as a young academic that had very little post-doctoral experiences. Because he pulled through successfully as the coordinator/head of Department, he was continuously and persistently given various leadership positions within and outside the Faculty. Between 2013 and 2015, he was the Sub Dean of the Faculty; and he returned as the Ag. Head of the Department of Mass Communication in 2018, the position he simultaneously occupied for one year with being the Director of the University’s Advancement Center before he was ultimately elected unopposed as the substantive Dean of the Faculty in July 2021. He was again re-elected unopposed as the substantive Dean of the Faculty in July 2023, and will serve in this capacity till August 2025.

The guiding principles that have facilitated Professor Azeez’s success as a scholar and a leader include purposefulness, humility, transparency and, essentially, commitment to academic excellence that tallies with the global practices and standards. As he radiates and exemplifies all these principles in all his activities as the Head of Department, Sub Dean, Director of the University Advancement Center, and the Dean of the Faculty, they rub off on his colleagues and students. With these principles, he has continued to build on his predecessors’ legacies to continuously sustain the Faculty as a flagship Faculty at the University of Ilorin.

Azeez’s ambition is to entrench the culture of academic excellence in teaching and research within the Faculty. With a penchant for raising the Faculty’s profile as an innovative hub while at the same time putting in place necessary teaching facilities as well as prioritizing students’ needs, Professor Azeez is determined to make the Faculty not only reputable, but also the only one and the best of its kind in Nigeria.

Besides a PhD in Communication Studies from the University of Leeds, United Kingdom, Azeez holds a National Certificate in Education from the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife. In 1988, he undertook the Oyo State voluntary service by teaching at Ansar-udeen Comprehensive High School in Ilero, Oyo State. After the service, he also taught at Iwajowa High School in Ijio for three years. In 1992, he enrolled at the University of Lagos, Lagos, to study Mass Communication, and graduated in 1997 with the best results in his Department and with eight prize awards in various courses in Journalism and Mass communication.

He undertook National Service at the Bauchi Radio Corporation in Bauchi State, Nigeria between November, 1997, and December, 1998. Immediately after the National Service, he began his Masters’ programme in International Law and Diplomacy at the University of Lagos. He completed the programme in November, 2000, with a prize award as the best student in International Law, and with an excellent thesis on the problems of the enforcement and repression of the breach of the laws of war.

He obtained a second Masters’ degree in Mass Communication, with the best result, at the University of Lagos in 2002, and proceeded to the University of Leeds in the UK, in December, 2003 for his PhD. Azeez successfully completed his PhD studies at the University of Leeds, UK, in 2008 with a thesis on the production and consumption of the representation of women in Nigerian films. He joined the service of the University of Ilorin in 2009, and has since then been rising through ranks and files before he was appointed a Professor of Mass Communication in 2021.

His research and teaching interests are: Mass Media Theories, Communication Research, Representations of Social Groups in the Media and the Emerging Film Industry in Nigeria. While he has jointly won a number of grants, he has published many articles in reputable outlets both within and outside the country.

Professor Azeez has been involved in conducting a cross-sectional investigation of media habits, access to health information, and media participation among target groups; identifying prospects of health communication interventions through the use of relevant media for reaching the respective target groups (OUTPUT 5 PATHS 2). He participated as co-investigator in the “Investigation of the Use of the Online Budget of Nigeria sponsored/funded by the World Wide Web Foundation, Boston, USA, as part of the network of research on the emerging impact of open data in developing countries (2011-2012). He also participated as a co-investigator in a TetFund National Research Fund Project on designing a multimedia platform for teaching basic subjects in Almajiri Schools in Nigeria (2019). He was once a World Bank Consultant for Validation, Verification and Consolidation Project for School Improvement in Kano State (2019).