The Arkansas Busi­ness Pub­lish­ing Group re­leased a list of the top 40 pro­fes­sion­als in the US state un­der the age of 40 in June. They were se­lect­ed based on the im­pact they have made on their com­pa­ny or com­mu­ni­ty and their po­ten­tial for be­com­ing a leader in busi­ness or pol­i­tics dur­ing the next decade.

A Trinida­di­an–Ay­oola Kel­lar-Car­leton, 37, As­so­ciate Di­rec­tor of Re­search at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Arkansas for Med­ical Sci­ences (UAMS) was among the dis­tin­guished group.

She over­sees the di­a­betes pre­ven­tion re­search pro­gramme of the Com­mu­ni­ty Health & Re­search Of­fice at UAMS and she has al­ways been in­ter­est­ed in do­ing par­tic­i­pa­to­ry re­search work.

Last year Kel­lar-Car­leton led the es­tab­lish­ment of Arkansas' on­ly ful­ly trilin­gual (Span­ish, Eng­lish, Mar­shallese) COVID-19 con­tact trac­ing cen­tre.

Part of the com­pre­hen­sive ap­proach, be­sides con­tact trac­ing, was al­so to pro­vide nav­i­ga­tion ser­vices to fa­cil­i­tate peo­ple who had trou­ble ac­cess­ing gro­ceries, food, rent as­sis­tance and let­ters for work ex­emp­tion.

A for­mer stu­dent of Bish­op Anstey High School and Di­a­mond Vale Gov­ern­ment Pri­ma­ry, Kel­lar-Car­leton grew up in Diego Mar­tin, the last of four chil­dren to Caryl and Nneka Kel­lar. In 2011, she mar­ried Nathan Car­leton, who she met while teach­ing in Namib­ia. Nathan serves as a Di­rec­tor of Com­mu­ni­ca­tions at Wal­mart Inc in Arkansas, where they live with their two chil­dren, Tai, nine and Priya, four.

In her spare time, Kel­lar-Car­leton and her fam­i­ly ex­plore the wa­ter­falls and hik­ing trails in Arkansas.

Speak­ing to the Sun­day Guardian she said, “I wasn't the per­fect stu­dent in high school. When I fin­ished Sec­ondary School in 2001, I was tru­ly un­sure what life would bring.

“One prin­ci­pal ac­tu­al­ly told me that I wouldn't amount to much in life. I al­so did not go di­rect­ly to uni­ver­si­ty af­ter grad­u­at­ing, be­cause I was still de­cid­ing what was next for me.

"How­ev­er, my fam­i­ly al­ways be­lieved in me and en­cour­aged me to fol­low my dreams. In 2003 my grand­moth­er Eileen Davis hand­ed me an ap­pli­ca­tion to CUNY (City Uni­ver­si­ty of New York) Hunter Col­lege, and said 'Col­in Pow­ell went there!'

"I ap­plied and was ac­cept­ed, and I left Trinidad de­ter­mined to ex­cel and take ad­van­tage of every op­por­tu­ni­ty af­ford­ed me."

She said be­ing a Trinida­di­an and leav­ing the beau­ti­ful is­land, the lifestyle and mov­ing to the US to as­sim­i­late and move on to a high­er ed­u­ca­tion struc­ture came with its own chal­lenges.

Ayoola Kellar-Carleton

Kel­lar-Car­leton cred­its hav­ing a strong sense of goals and what you would like to achieve, then com­bin­ing that with max­imis­ing oth­er op­por­tu­ni­ties that may come your way.

She ad­vised hav­ing a mind­set of what can you learn, take from this and grow, then use that to pro­pel you to the next step of what you need to achieve and to work on. She al­ways ap­proached life and chal­lenges with what is now called a growth mind­set, which refers to the be­lief that tal­ents are mal­leable by what­ev­er means.

Kel­lar-Car­leton en­rolled at Hunter Col­lege in 2004, start­ing a near­ly two-decade ed­u­ca­tion­al and pro­fes­sion­al jour­ney that in­clud­ed a se­mes­ter in Ban­ga­lore, In­dia, a year teach­ing Eng­lish in the African na­tion of Namib­ia, through the Har­vard-af­fil­i­ate WorldTeach in 2009, a Mas­ter’s pro­gramme at Co­lum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty, and then a move from New York City to Arkansas.

She al­so went to grad­u­ate school fo­cus­ing on strate­gic plan­ning and fi­nance to be able to work with un­der-rep­re­sent­ed com­mu­ni­ties in the Caribbean.

Kel­lar-Car­leton be­lieves a lot in ed­u­ca­tion, her time as a re­searcher and teacher in Namib­ia showed her first-hand how ed­u­ca­tion over­lapped with health, how poor health, not enough food im­pact­ed ed­u­ca­tion­al per­for­mance, which fu­elled her pas­sion to have a larg­er con­tri­bu­tion in the field.

She then worked for the Ford Foun­da­tion as a pro­gramme an­a­lyst for their high­er ed­u­ca­tion port­fo­lio to im­prove ac­cess to high­er ed­u­ca­tion for com­mu­ni­ties in the An­dean Re­gion and South­ern Cone such as Brazil, Chile, Ar­genti­na, Uruguay, Pe­ru, and Colom­bia.

Kel­lar-Car­leton said that the ini­tia­tive al­so had op­er­a­tions in the US, South Africa, Egypt and Chi­na.

Dur­ing her time at the Ford Foun­da­tion, she was work­ing on this pro­gramme in var­i­ous coun­tries meet­ing im­pact as­sess­ments, col­lec­tive im­pact the­o­ry, and man­aged strate­gic plan­ning for that port­fo­lio.

Caryl Kel­lar, her fa­ther, said that at one point in time he was of the opin­ion that she didn't work as hard as her sib­lings, Ayan­na, a Ju­ris Doc­tor and Abenaa, a med­ical doc­tor to achieve her aca­d­e­m­ic re­sults.

Chuck­ling, he re­vealed that they put in 'end­less hours' of study­ing, the per­cep­tion was she did not. How­ev­er, when their re­sults came, she did bet­ter than them, and was a nat­ur­al.

His moth­er called Kel­lar-Car­leton, the youngest child, the bright­est.

Kel­lar-Car­leton told her fa­ther that she stud­ied hard and showed him an ar­ti­cle that stat­ed Ivy Lea­guers (her sis­ter Ayan­na and her went to Co­lum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty and were al­so Ivy Lea­guers) put in 14-16 hours a day study­ing. Keller was shocked to learn that, he ex­claimed with a laugh.