Just one week after he graduated from Yale Law School, while he was training for the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, Seun Adebiyi was diagnosed with lymphoma and leukemia. This forced him to put his Olympic dreams on the back burner as he rethought his life plans.
Adebiyi knows all about mental toughness and resilience. After experiencing firsthand the difficulty of finding stem cell donors (the odds of finding a genetically compatible donor is less than 17 percent for those of African descent, compared to 70 percent for Caucasians), Seun took it upon himself to found Nigeria’s first national bone marrow registry–the second ever in Africa.
