About
I’m a physician and epidemiologist. For most of the last fourteen years I’ve worked on disease surveillance with the World Health Organization, first in the field in Nigeria, then at the Regional Office for Africa in Brazzaville, and then at headquarters in Geneva. Since December 2025 I’ve been at the WHO Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence in Berlin, where I lead the work on data harmonization and standardization.
I studied medicine at Igbinedion University in Nigeria and did my MPH at the University of Sheffield. I’m a fellow of the Emerging Leaders in Biosecurity Initiative at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.
What I work on
The question I keep coming back to is why surveillance so often sees an outbreak late, even when the early signal was already sitting in someone’s data.
It’s rarely because nobody was looking. More often the information existed in pieces: a clinic register, a lab spreadsheet, an animal health report, a news item. Each was recorded in a different format, under different case definitions, by people with no easy way to put the pieces together.
That’s what my current work is about. At the Berlin Hub I lead a project on data harmonization. It sets data standards for health surveillance, lines them up with the standards other sectors already use (animal, plant and environmental health, climate, hospital use), and builds tools that help countries bring together data that follows no standard at all. I also lead a community of practice for epidemiologists, data analysts, software engineers and national decision-makers working on these problems. And I oversee the country pilots of the WHO Digital Adaptation Kit for infectious disease surveillance.
Most of how I think about this comes from earlier work:
- Osun State, Nigeria 2015–2017I worked on polio eradication in Nigeria, as part of the team that saw the country, and with it the WHO African Region, certified free of wild poliovirus in 2020. In Osun I was responsible for polio and priority-disease surveillance across the state, and took part in the response to a vaccine-derived poliovirus outbreak.
- Northeast Nigeria 2017–2019During the humanitarian crisis I managed two surveillance systems side by side: EWARS in Borno and routine IDSR in Adamawa and Yobe. I led the work to introduce electronic IDSR reporting in Adamawa and Yobe. In the 2018 hepatitis E outbreak across the Lake Chad Basin, I set up point-of-entry screening, coordinated with counterparts in Niger.
- WHO Regional Office for Africa, Brazzaville 2019–2023I worked on epidemic intelligence: detecting, verifying and assessing acute public health events across 47 countries. I coordinated epidemiology and surveillance for the regional COVID-19 response, then led day-to-day epidemiology for the regional Ebola response to the outbreak in Uganda.
- WHO headquarters, Geneva 2023–2025I led a review of how WHO’s own departments do surveillance, and the development of a decision-support tool that helps countries choose the right mix of surveillance approaches for their context.
Publications
Peer-reviewed papers, newest first. marks papers where I’m first author. My full record is on ORCID.
2026
- ★Event-based surveillance in the WHO African region: baseline implementation before the COVID-19 pandemic
2025
- ★A review of the performance of the early warning alert and response system (EWARS) in conflict-affected Borno State, Nigeria: a five-year descriptive analysis
- ★Assessing the utility of the COVID-19 epidemic Situations of Concern classification system in guiding operational responses to the pandemic in the WHO African region: retrospective analysis
2024
- Informing the pandemic response: the role of the WHO’s COVID-19 Weekly Epidemiological Update
2023
- Analysing the implementation of infection prevention and control measures in health care facilities during the COVID-19 pandemic in the African Region
- Description of the first global outbreak of mpox: an analysis of global surveillance data
- WHO Global Situational Alert System: a mixed methods multistage approach to identify country-level COVID-19 alerts
2022
- Transitioning the COVID-19 response in the WHO African region: a proposed framework for rethinking and rebuilding health systems
- An in-depth statistical analysis of the COVID-19 pandemic’s initial spread in the WHO African region
- Time to death and risk factors associated with mortality among COVID-19 cases in countries within the WHO African region in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic
2021
- Implementing epidemic intelligence in the WHO African region for early detection and response to acute public health events
- COVID-19 in the WHO African region: using risk assessment to inform decisions on public health and social measures
- Electronic reporting of integrated disease surveillance and response: lessons learned from northeast Nigeria, 2019
- Leveraging polio GIS platforms in the African Region for mitigating COVID-19 contact tracing and surveillance challenges
2019
- Infectious disease outbreaks in the African region: overview of events reported to the World Health Organization in 2018
- Complete genome sequence of a hepatitis E virus genotype 1e strain from an outbreak in Nigeria, 2017
2018
- A new hepatitis E virus genotype 2 strain identified from an outbreak in Nigeria, 2017
Contact
The best way to reach me is by email:
I’m also on LinkedIn.