At the spring meeting of the University of Iowa Student Research Groupon May 27, Adeleke received the award for 2022 Outstanding Dental Researcher, recognizing her excellence as a student researcher.

Her mentor, Azeez Butali, professor in oral pathology, radiology, and medicine, expressed his pride in her accomplishments.

"During her time in my lab, she worked on several projects including the sequencing of the South African cleft samples and copy number variations analyses using the African GWAS data. Chichi also contributed to 7 publications and several abstracts presented at National and International meetings. She received several research awards, was one of 20 dental students nationwide who received research travel awards to the IADR and AADR in 2020 and 2021. In 2021, she was recognized by the University of Iowa as one of the research students who Dared to Discover and her portrait was placed at the Capitol Mall."