Ayo grew up in Lagos, Nigeria where he ranked second in his graduating class & placed among the top students regionally on the UTME. At 14, he won the NAPPS Regional Science Fair with a light-sensor system built from photodiodes & robotics, becoming the first in his school’s history to reach that stage.

By 2023 at Howard, he had already thrown himself into everything. He joined hackathons at MIT & Georgia Tech, served as an IEEE-Howard liaison & stayed active in NSBE. He was named an NSTMF inSTEM Scholar, won HP’s FOWA Competition & was invited as a model delegate to the UNA-USA at the U.S. Department of State. Soon after, he was flown to New York as a Bloomberg Fellow, to Princeton as a Bloomberg Tech Lab Fellow, & to Texas for an Alcon R&D program where his team pitched to executives.

At 17, he landed an internship at Meta as 1 of only 54 MetaU interns nationwide. On Instagram’s auth infra team, he worked on backend systems at scale. By 18, he already co-authored ML research on conversational bias at Howard & won the sponsored health track at HackHarvard after teaching himself Swift overnight to build a health management app.

In 2024, he joined NASA’s RockSat-C M.I.S.T program, where his team built a robotic arm for suturing in space & tested it under high-vibration conditions. That work led to sponsorships at Thurgood Marshall’s DevCon & an Amazon scholarship. Six months later, he was selected for the NIH AIM-AHEAD Premiere Undergraduate Research Cohort, contributing to health research. At 19, he joined Apple’s Wireless Technologies & Ecosystems org, building ML pipelines that plugged into CI/CD for iPhones, iPads & Watches.

In January 2025, he was named a D.E. Shaw Latitude Fellow, 1 of just 47 nationwide, earning a front-row seat at the intersection of finance & systems engineering.

He backs the work with focused learning, completing the Harvard/edX TinyML specialization and MIT courses in Computational Science & Engineering to optimize ML models for edge devices & constrained hardware. He also writes on Medium & Dev.to. His projects & fellowships have taken him across 15+ states, including NY, Cali, Texas & DC, reaching national stages, corporate labs & university conferences.

Ayo is among the rare undergrads at an HBCU who have built & scaled backend & AI systems, and won national competitions.