Risi Onwude is Senior Manager, Talent Development at Seplat Energy, with over 20 years of experience across the Nigerian energy sector. She began her career as a Reservoir Engineer at ExxonMobil and spent 17 years in the commercial, operational and technical side of the oil and gas business before moving into human resources, a combination that underpins her approach to people strategy. Her HR career spans enterprise talent management, strategic workforce planning, performance system design, organisational effectiveness and large-scale change management, developed across Nigeria, Mozambique and global functions at ExxonMobil. Most recently she led all HR workstreams for the ExxonMobil joint venture divestment transition team, the transaction that completed at change of control in December 2024 and created Seplat Energy Producing Nigeria Unlimited. She holds an MSc in Petroleum Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin and a BEng in Chemical Engineering from the University of Benin, and completed the Advanced Leadership and Management Programme at Oxford's Saïd Business School. She is a Chartered Fellow of the CIPD.