Dr. Kadiri Akeem Babalola is Associate Professor of Botany. He specializes in Plant Taxonomy and Systematics. He is very well familiar with the West African flora. He has employed morphological, anatomical and a bit of molecular data in resolving taxonomic intricacies in several taxonomically difficult plant taxa.  His focus plants have been drawn from Eudicots and Magnoliids taxa, from species up to the family level. Some of the plants which he has taxonomically treated include Putranjivaceae, a segregate of the sensu lato Euphorbiaceae, the largest African genus (Beilschmiedia) of the basal angiosperm family- Lauraceae and some monotypic genera, especially Cassytha, also in Lauraceae, Furthermore, he has also contributed useful data towards understanding the palaeogeographical and evolutionary history of the African legume tribe Detarieae while his current taxonomic research interests are on the primitive angiosperm  family- Annonaceae and understanding the basis of the morphological diversity of the African Lagenaria of the Cucurbitaceae family. He also contributed useful data to assist in solving identification problem that confront the Asiatic Potamogeton. In all, he has based most of his taxonomic decision on data derived from leaf stomatal apparatus, other epidermal characteristics and gross morphology. By extension, he has good data, useful for pharmacognostic endeavor, ethnobotany and environmental studies. 

Dr. Kadiri is a member of the Botanical Society of Nigeria (BOSON), American Society of Plant Taxonomists (ASPT), Nigerian Environmental Society (NES), Society for Environmental Toxicology and Pollution Mitigation, Society for Forensic and Analytical Scientists Nigeria (SFASN), Centre for Biodiversity Conservation and Environmental Management (CEBCEM) and African Centre of Excellence for Drug Research, Herbal Medicine Development and Regulatory Science (ACE-DHARS). He is a reviewer to many scholarly plant taxonomy journals across the globe. He is a TWAS scholar and also has received funding support from the Royal Society of London, Third World Academy of Science, Chinese Academy of Science and University of Lagos, Nigeria where he obtained B. Sc, M. Sc. and Ph. D between 1991 and 2006. He has over 40 articles published in peer reviewed journals all over the world. Knowledge and experience transfer has been done to over 50 students at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels.