Engineering Excellence and Courage: In Conversation with Dr. Nike Folayan MBE
- Dec 1, 2025
- 5 min read
When Dr. Nike Folayan MBE talks about her childhood, she doesn’t begin with titles, accolades, or the corridors of influence she now frequently walks. She begins with service. As a pioneering engineer who “saves lives”, her career journey has been shaped by variety, curiosity and resilience.
A Childhood of Curiosity
Born to Nigerian parents in London, Dr. Nike says she grew up in a home “that really valued giving back.” Her father, a mechanical engineer, encouraged curiosity as an everyday ritual. Her mother modelled strength, sharp instincts, and unwavering protection. Together, they raised a child who understood, at an early age, that the world was bigger than her – and that she had a role within it.
Before the awards and boardrooms, there was a young girl crouched behind an old-style TV-set wondering how “people got into the TV.” She didn’t know the word for what she was fascinated by, but her father called it engineering (a slightly biased view, one might suspect). For Dr. Nike, she disagreed – in her mind, engineering was just cars and grease.
Her father taught her the anatomy of a car before she turned ten, and never once said “this is for boys”. It simply was what it was. He taught. She learned. And she thrived. Curiosity has a habit of revealing our paths before we recognise them. As a young child, Dr. Nike loved maths and physics and spent hours taking radios apart and putting them back together again. Despite her mother’s worries, engineering called her.
So, What Is Engineering?
Engineering is often perceived as a field reserved for the naturally gifted – an exclusive world for those with extraordinary brains. But for Dr. Nike, engineering is simply the practice of being creative whilst keeping things elegantly simple.
“The minute you wake up, you encounter engineering,” she says. From the toothbrush you pick up to the door you open as you leave your home, every object around you has been intentionally designed. “Even the proportions of paint in art, or sugar in your cornflakes – that’s engineering.”
Dr. Nike is an engineer who “saves lives”. As the Technical Director of WSP , she is responsible for the technical strategic direction of communications and control in the UK and India, in addition to expanding its capabilities. An electronics and communications engineer by trade, she and her team build critical networks that emergency services rely on. They create systems that allow first responders to communicate within tunnels, railways and complex infrastructure environments, and in that process, save lives. If you ever find yourself stranded in a tunnel, unable to reach help, it’s engineers like Dr. Nike who ensure fire crews, police, and ambulance teams can access you. Her networks make the invisible, visible, and the unreachable reachable.
The Weight of Being the Only One
From researcher to consultant, Dr. Nike’s journey hasn’t been plain sailing. Since her school days, she was used to walking into classrooms where the ratio of boys to girls was 30:2. The subtle dismissals and quiet questioning of her competence were also relentless – but still, she persisted.
“On my first day of work, I walked in and, on a floor of about 150 men, I was the only woman - and a Black woman at that.”
Bullying wasn’t new to her as she experienced it firsthand as a child. But its evolution in a professional setting was harder to name. “They’re not overt ‘isms’ ,” she says. "It’s exclusion. It’s the projects you aren’t assigned. It’s the work drinks you’re not invited to. It's the promotions that pass you by.”
Dr. Nike recalled a time when she was asked by her boss to lead a meeting. As she made herself a rooibos tea, a colleague she had never met before took it out of her hand and said, “thank you” , assuming she was there to serve. She made herself another tea, and when she walked in the meeting to lead it, the man was mortified. Still, Dr. Nike chose perseverance.
Finding Her Voice and Standing for Others
For a large part of her career, Dr. Nike struggled with confidence after enduring years of subtle belittlement. She was even nicknamed “the mumbler,” finding it difficult to articulate herself around certain colleagues.
But over time, she built a trusted community – people who uplifted her and interrupted bias in real time.
"My colleague Bob repeated the exact same words I said, and everyone responded 'Yeah yeah, what Bob said'. And he said 'Well Nike just said the same thing.'"
Young women also wrote to her every summer sharing their studies and dreams. Her network became her fuel. “They expected me to succeed,” she says. And that expectation kept her going.
Building a Legacy with AfBE UK and Mission 44
In 2007, Dr. Nike and her brother Dr. Ollie Folayan MBE, founded the Association for Black and Minority Ethnic Engineers (AfBE UK). They launched it at a time when Black communities were being “blamed” for violence in London and the Royal Academy of Engineering was calling for visible role models. Dr. Nike and Dr. Ollie wanted to change not only perceptions, but outcomes with their mission to normalise the visibility of Black engineering excellence.
From grassroots efforts, AfBE UK has grown into a national organisation with:
3,000 professional members
80 corporate partners
Programmes that support Black and ethnic minority talent from primary school all the way to executive boardrooms
Dr. Nike also serves on the board of Mission 44, founded by Sir Lewis Hamilton following the Hamilton Report. Mission 44 backs organisations working to remove systemic barriers and expand access to STEM pathways. For Dr. Nike, the work aligns deeply with her purpose: widening the funnel of opportunity, so no child feels like engineering “isn’t for them”.
Choosing Courage, Every Time
If Dr. Nike’s journey teaches you anything, it’s that confidence isn’t the only prerequisite for impact. Persistence is. Community is. Purpose is. She hasn’t always been sure of herself, but she has always kept going. Her story is more than an engineering journey. It's a masterclass in building belonging where none existed – and more importantly, backing yourself and your abilities every step of the way.
Get to know Dr. Nike:
Born: London, UK
Ethnicity: Nigerian 🇳🇬
One invention more people should know about: The GPS and Gladys West
If you could automate a daily task in your life, what would it be: Cooking
Favourite project to work on: A sixteen-station in Bogotá, Colombia where I was responsible for designing a WiFi network that connects thousands of people.
Song on rotation: Sunshine by Asake
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