THE DROPOUT PLAYING CHESS WITH THE UNIVERSE: A Conversation with David Dosu, the Nigerian Researcher at CERN Building Pathways for African Innovation.

By Ugo Aliogo

It was 2 p.m. on a bright Saturday in Lagos. Sunlight poured through the windows of a café in Victoria Island, warming the wood tables and lighting the green plants that leaned lazily toward the panes. Soft jazz murmured from hidden speakers, and the faint aroma of baked croissants mingled with espresso. A few foreigners typed intently on laptops, wine glasses catching the sun, while couples whispered across tables, voices low and intimate, almost blending into the music.

I was already seated, a glass of fresh juice glistening with condensation. My blue top caught the light every time I shifted, and though my fingers played with my phone, my mind was elsewhere—circling the conversation ahead. The air hummed with the casual rhythm of weekend life, yet there was a stillness at my table, the kind that comes when you know something important is about to unfold.

Then David arrived.

He walked in with the kind of ease that fills a room before words do—a plain white T-shirt, black trousers, and sneakers that had clearly seen a few airports. There was an energy about him, a quiet excitement that slipped through his calm. When our eyes met, his grin came quick and unguarded before settling into something softer, steadier. “Helloooo,” he said, sliding into the chair across from me. The smile lingered in his eyes—the kind that says it’s been a long time coming.

“How are you doing?” he added. I smiled. “I am doing very well. It’s so good to see you.”

We ordered jollof rice with turkey and cake for dessert, along with another round of juice. While the waitress prepared our plates, we talked about his month..

“So,” I began, watching him stir his juice, “what has it been like, moving between these worlds—Geneva, Ghana, Lagos—all in a matter of weeks?”

He leaned back, fingers tracing the rim of his glass. “It’s exhausting,” he said, voice level but amused, “but that’s fine. You realise quickly what matters, and what’s just… noise.”

Curiosity and Mischief

If mischief had a face, it would probably wear David’s grin. “I once convinced my father—a pastor—to let me attend Quranic school,” he recalls, “I also mostly lied about fasting so I could eat the insanely good early morning food my Muslim friend’s mom made.”

It’s the kind of memory that says everything—mischievous, crazy, curious, and an unwillingness to accept things as they are. “I hated school and often thought I was smarter than my teachers,” he says, amused. “I might have been.” He adds. I wasn’t sure what to make of that.

In Primary 2, during a Home Economics assessment, he was asked how many times people eat in a day. He wrote five. The teacher failed him. “I told her we eat five times in my family, so I wasn’t wrong. The question was,” he recalls. “She laughed and told me to sit, but I went to the proprietor and reported it. In the end, I got full marks.”

He pauses, “By the way, I knew three was the expected answer. I just wanted to prove the question was badly phrased.”

I nodded, jotting notes silently. “You’ve always questioned the framing of things,” I said.

He shrugged. “If the world doesn’t make sense, why pretend?”

That defiance wasn’t arrogance—it was clarity. Even as a child, he wanted things to make sense or at least, make sense out of nothing. He remembers his first day at school at age two. “I couldn’t sit still. I cried for my mom. Other kids stopped after a week or two, but I didn’t. I just learned it didn’t matter if I continued crying, so I stopped and at around age 6, switched to faking sickness.”

Despite this restlessness, brilliance followed him. “I finished both primary and secondary school as the best student, but with less than 50 percent attendance. Teachers thought I had sickle cell or something.”

Competition was his only motivation. “I think I was in primary 2 when inter-class quizzes started, I learned everything up to Primary 6 so I could beat everyone—especially my elder sister’s class. And I always did.” He shakes his head, remembering. “In secondary school, boredom returned. Until competitions came back in my last year, I joined older boys and did terrible, terrible things.”

David left the classroom only to find himself in a laboratory where the world studies the universe. Before Idalia Africa, before the applause, before he became the young man building bridges for others to cross into possibility, David was just another student in a Nigerian lecture hall, restless and uneasy, wondering why learning felt like confinement.

He didn’t hate education; he just couldn’t stand its cage. So he walked away—not out of arrogance or rebellion, but from a deep knowing that purpose sometimes lives outside permission. “Fk seeking permission from people. Fk them,” he says, his tone hard but unbothered.

Years later, that decision would lead him to CERN, the world’s largest particle physics lab, and then to co-founding Idalia Africa, a nonprofit helping Africans access education and opportunities that feel more like discovery than punishment.

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University and Strategic Dropouts

UNIBEN — a new world, but, really, the same David.

“Uniben was great,” he says, drawing out the word like he’s tasting it. “I mostly skipped classes, had awesome but unserious friends.” He laughs. “By Year 3, I dropped out to program robots for a company in Benin. Got fired for not being punctual, then went back to school just before exams. That was the only year I didn’t make a first class.”

He shrugs, the memory landing like some private joke. “It cost me the overall first class, but honestly? I never wanted or needed it anyway.”

Post UNIBEN, he applied for a fully funded masters scholarship in advance particle physics and got it. However, 10 months into what is supposed to be a two year program, he dropped out. For most people, this would feel like failure. For David, it was a “why not?” thing. “I always knew I wouldn’t finish my master’s. I was broke and bored. A fully funded master’s in Europe seemed like a smart fix for both.”

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Decisions and Clarity

When asked whether his decisions built up over time, David pauses, eyes narrowing slightly. “No. I don’t think I build up decisions over time. Clarity is my edge, career-wise. Not that you asked, but relationship-wise, I’m total shit.”

He’s fascinated by how people see opportunities. “Most think of opportunities as lifelines. I see them as attacking vectors aimed at the concrete ideas I have on how to build the future. When they come—and they often do—I treat them like chess pawns or cards. Play the best hand I can, then step back if a better move presents itself.”

“Sunk-cost,” he reflects, “is what withers most promising careers. The only immutable laws are those of physics. Everything else is, in my view, a suggestion. So why people defer life plans or feel they ‘have to finish’ what they start is something I’ll never understand experientially. Maybe that’s good. I don’t care.”

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Struggle, Sacrifice, and Garri

The months after leaving his master’s program were anything but glamorous. “Terrible,” he says plainly. He was broke, returning to building a startup while surviving mostly on garri. Since his father passed when David was 12, he had been the family’s breadwinner. “So my family suffered my decision with me. But I made sure the startup profits kept them afloat. My friends helped a lot too. Outside of them, I an nothing.”

Sometimes, he allowed himself vulnerability. “Sometimes I’d cry in the bathroom. My friends would sing Baby Shark or You Are My Sunshine until I laughed again.”

Yet, he never doubted his capacity to rise. “I knew I could always go back to school anywhere in the world if the startup failed. That knowledge was my backup plan—and my freedom.”

Books and friendships became his refuge: Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama, Zero to One by Peter Thiel, and essays by Sam Altman. “Ann. My friends. They kept me grounded,” he adds quietly, as if remembering the warmth that pulled him through the noise.

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CERN and Validation

In 2022, while still at UNIBEN, David landed an internship at CERN—becoming one of the first sub-Saharan Africans in the summer school program. “It was surreal,” he says. “It felt like confirmation and that was validating.”

He leans back, thinking. “The rules aren’t real,” he says eventually, his voice low but steady. “If you’re special—or just stubborn enough—the universe will rearrange itself to meet you halfway.”

A few months after leaving his master’s program and wrestling with a struggling startup, CERN reached out. He took the job offer. “Now I do AI research and lecture master’s students at the University of Geneva twice a week,” he says.

“It was surreal and validating,” he admits. “There’s something beautiful about being one out of many. But when I got to CERN and saw how few Black people there were, it broke my heart a little. That was one of the experiences that made me want to do more.”

He looks up, his tone softening. “People often think I’m arrogant—I’m not, but I don’t mind the perception. If you come from an underrepresented place, you cannot afford to be the kind of humble people want—unless you have mentors who would help you navigate the world’s political bit, that is.”

His voice sharpens again, that familiar defiant spark resurfacing. “Physics is the law. Everything else? A suggestion. You can email your way into whatever life you can imagine. Why most people don’t do this has been one of the questions I’ve pondered on a lot lately. Thankfully, I think it can be taught.”

He leans in, “I’ve always thought of the world as split between two factions; the agents and the NPCs—abbreviated for the non-player-characters that serve as backdrops in video games, and whose actions are hardcoded by the game designers. Ours is a continent blessed by folks who define success by titles and degrees, which unfortunately, makes them not so different from NPCs. Thankfully, this can be fixed.”

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Idalia Africa

David co-founded Idalia Africa with Destiny Ogedegbe, a Harvard-trained New York attorney. “We wanted to build something that exponentially increases Africa’s contribution to global innovation by training, equipping, and accelerating talented people across the continent,” he says.

He lights up as he talks about their progress. “Our virtual lecture series pulled in thousands of students from seventy-four institutions across Nigeria, Ghana, and Kenya,” he says. “We even facilitated virtual tours of CERN’s CMS experiment — you know, letting African students actually see what world-class research looks like. We brought in top researchers, helped schools collaborate internationally and next, we’re embedding professors into African universities. OpenAI, NASA, Tesla, SpaceX—those are the kinds of partnerships we’re chasing.”

I raise my brows. “That’s… huge.”

He nods, but there’s no trace of arrogance—just conviction. “We’re democratizing innovation,” he says. “It shouldn’t matter what school you went to or what state you’re from. The multiplier effect we’re creating is borderless. You’ll see.”

When I ask what he’s learned from all of this—the mischief, the dropouts, the breakthroughs—he pauses for a moment. “It’s important to be maximally useful,” he says finally. “You become special because you compounded advantages caused by luck. Don’t hoard it. Find a cause and be its channel. Everything good will come”

As he spoke about Idalia, about rebellion, about usefulness, I realised that David’s story wasn’t about success in the traditional sense; it was about the refusal to let the usual structure dictate destiny.

In a world obsessed with permission, he chose possibility. And maybe that’s the lesson: that the world bends, not for those who wait to be chosen, but for those bold enough to rewrite its rules.

David Dosu is a research scientist at CERN and co-founder of Idalia Africa, an accelerator reshaping African higher education and innovation.