Tolullah Oni

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Tolullah Oni
Tolu Oni at World Economic Forum.jpg
Oni speaks at the World Economic Forum in 2018
Born
Alma mater University College London
Imperial College London
Known forInternational health
Scientific career
Institutions University of Cape Town
University of Cambridge

Tolullah "Tolu" Oni (born 1980) is a Nigerian urban epidemiologist at the Medical Research Council Epidemiology Unit at the University of Cambridge. [1] She is a NextEinstein Forum Fellow [2] and World Economic Forum Young Global Leader. [3]

Contents

Early life and education

Oni was born in Lagos. [4] At the age of seven Oni watched a documentary about cardiac surgery and wanted to become a pediatric cardiac surgeon. [5] [6] She attended boarding school. [7] She trained in medicine with international health at University College London, where she earned a Bachelor's degree in 2001. [7] She completed house jobs in the United Kingdom and Australia, and became interested in HIV. [5] She was made president of the Medical Students' Union. [7] Oni was a doctoral student at Imperial College London, where she started to study health outcomes. [8] [9] She explored how social determinants impacted health conditions, and finished her PhD in 2012. [10] [11] Oni was awarded the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene Medical Student Elective Prize, and moved to South Africa. [7]

Research and career

Oni worked in South Africa, where she established an interdisciplinary program Research Initiative for Cities Health and Equity (RICHE) at the University of Cape Town in 2007. [12] RICHE works on urban health, identifying opportunities to implement public health policies in fast growing cities. [13] She worked as a registrar in the Western Cape Department of Health. [14] She became interested in interventions that can manage chronic infections and non-communicable diseases. [5] [15] Oni was made a senior lecturer at the University of Cape Town. [10] Here, she developed the University of Cape Town's first undergraduate degree in global health, which launched in 2014. [16] The course created by Oni is one of the first to teach global health from the perspective of the Global South. [5]

She moved to the University of Cambridge, where she joined the Medical Research Council Epidemiology Unit as a senior research fellow. [17] [18] Here she is a member of the Global Diet and Activity Research Group and Network (GDAR) network, which works to prevent non-communicable diseases in low-income countries. [19]

Public engagement and policy

Oni has presented at the United Nations, the World Health Organization and World Economic Forum. [20] [21] [22] Onu is a board of Future Earth and the African Academy of Sciences platform for open research. [23] Oni is a Fellow of the African Academy of Sciences, and was elected a Fellow of NextEinstein in 2015 and the Stellenbosch University Institute for Advanced Study in 2017. [10] [24] [25] [26] She was elected one of the Co-Chairs of the Global Young Academy in 2018. [4] Oni serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Urban Health and The Lancet's Planetary Health. [23] [27] She has written for The Conversation. [28] Oni serves as a judge for the Nature Inspiring Science Award. [29]

Awards and honours

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">University of Cape Town</span> Public university in Cape Town, South Africa

The University of Cape Town (UCT) is a public research university in Cape Town, South Africa. Established in 1829 as the South African College, it was granted full university status in 1918, making it the oldest university in South Africa and the oldest university in Sub-Saharan Africa in continuous operation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">African Academy of Sciences</span>

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Dr. Abdallah Daar is an emeritus Professor of Clinical Public Health, Global Health, and Surgery at the University of Toronto. He has also been a Senior Scientist at the Research Institutes of University Health Network/Toronto General Hospital Research Institute, and the Hospital for SickKids. At the University of Toronto Joint Centre for Bioethics, from 2001 to 2007, he was the co-director of the Canadian Program on Genomics and Global Health, and the Director of the University of Toronto Program in Applied Ethics and Biotechnology. At the Sandra Rotman Centre, he was Director of Ethics and Commercialization.

Floretta Avril Boonzaier is a South African psychologist and Professor of Psychology at the University of Cape Town. She is noted for her work in feminist, critical and postcolonial psychologies, subjectivity in relation to race, gender and sexuality, and gender-based violence, and qualitative psychologies, especially narrative, discursive and participatory methods. She heads the Hub for Decolonial Feminist Psychologies in Africa with Shose Kessi.

Kelly Chibale PhD, MASSAf, FAAS, Fellow of UCT, FRSSAf, FRSC is professor of organic chemistry at the University of Cape Town, and the founder and director of H3D research center and H3D Foundation NPC. In 2018 he was recognised as one of Fortune magazine's top 50 World's Greatest Leaders. His research focuses on drug discovery and the development of tools and models to contribute to improving treatment outcomes in people of African descent or heritage.

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Tania S. Douglas was a Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Research Chair in Biomedical Engineering and Innovation as well as Director of the Medical Imaging Research Unit in the University of Cape Town (UCT), South Africa. She conducted research concerning medical innovation, image analysis, and the development of technologies to improve medical device innovation in South Africa. She was also the founding Editor-in-Chief of Global Health Innovation, a journal which disseminates research results about health innovation in developing settings.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Marian Asantewah Nkansah</span> Ghanaian scientist

Marian Asantewah Nkansah is a Ghanaian environmental chemist. Her research work focuses on finding solutions to environmental problems associated with levels and fate of toxic substances such as heavy/trace metals, persistent organic pollutants (POPs) and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in food, water, soil, rocks, sediments and other environmental samples. She also researches on the interaction of these pollutants with each other in the environment. In 2016, together with some scientists from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, she led a research which led to the confirmation that edible white clay poses potential cancer risk. In 2016, she became the first scientist to win the Fayzah M. Al-Kharafi Prize, an annual award that recognises exceptional women scientists from scientifically and technologically lagging countries. She and Collins Obuah, another scientist from the University of Ghana, were the two scientist selected to attend the Lindau Nobel Laureate meeting in 2017. In 2021, she was among five women recipients in developing countries of the OWSD-Elsevier Foundation Awards. She received the 2022 Africa Role Model Overall Female Personality Award, and was inducted as a Fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences the same year.

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Carolyn Williamson is a South African virologist and microbiologist who is a professor of medical virology at the University of Cape Town. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of South Africa and the African Academy of Sciences, and a member of the Academy of Science of South Africa. Her research focuses on HIV vaccine development and prevention of the disease.

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