University of Illinois Springfield

Innovate Springfield

Member Spotlight  •  April 2026

From Mechanical Engineering to Medicaid Policy

He Came to Springfield Looking for Opportunity. He Found a Mission.

Dimeji Adaramewa did not plan to end up in healthcare policy research. He studied mechanical engineering at Covenant University in Nigeria, worked in IT support in Lagos, and landed in the United States as a graduate student searching for the right fit. When he found the MPART posting, he did not have a medical background and he knew it. He told them anyway: I learn fast, I adapt, and I can use what I know to make your research better. They said yes. He has been happy ever since.

MPART, the Medicaid Policy Applied Research Team, is a first-of-its-kind research initiative housed at UIS and connected to the Office of Medicaid Innovation. Dimeji is part of its inaugural cohort, a small team of graduate students doing work that did not exist in this form before they started it.

The Work Behind the Research

MPART started with a focused question: which Medicaid policies are being overlooked by decision makers, and why? That question has since grown into something much larger. The team now tracks policy changes across all fifty states, examining how rules shift access to benefits and what the data reveals about outcomes.

One of Dimeji's central contributions has been curating the datasets that make the AI side of the work possible. That includes tracking policy mechanisms like Section 1115 waivers, which allow decision makers to test new rules within state Medicaid programs and measure the effect. Finding that data is harder than it sounds. Some datasets require formal government requests that can take weeks, with no guarantee of a response. Dimeji works with what is publicly available and builds from there.

The goal is not just to store that data. It is to train an AI system that can reason through it, surface patterns that humans might miss, and put better information in front of the people making policy decisions.

The Path That Brought Him Here

Dimeji's first stop in the United States was the University of West Georgia. The environment was not right for him, so he kept looking. When he found UIS, he noticed something specific: a large Nigerian student community. It felt like it could feel like home. He applied, transferred, and has not looked back.

His major is Management Information Systems, not public health, not policy. But his mechanical engineering training gave him a research foundation, and his growing fluency in AI development gave him something MPART needed. Under the mentorship of Dr. Benjamin Barnard, he has moved from researcher to what he now calls an AI architect, someone building the infrastructure that makes the team's work possible.

The Moment That Opened Doors

When U.S. Senator Dick Durbin visited Innovate Springfield, Dimeji was in the room. He describes it simply: groundbreaking. Scary, exciting, and unlike anything he had experienced before. He had never met a senator. He did not expect to be in that room. But MPART's work had earned that visibility, and being seen by decision makers at that level is exactly the kind of reward he did not know to look for when he took the job.

What He Is Building Toward

After he graduates, Dimeji wants to work in AI architecture and AI system design. Not because research is behind him, but because he sees where the world is going and wants to help build it. The work at MPART gave him the clarity. The tools, the datasets, the local inference server running in the Innovate Springfield space, all of it pointed him toward the same answer.

He has one piece of advice for the international student or career changer who is not sure they qualify: be open-minded. Show up. Tell them what you can do. The door might already be open.