Chikwe Ihekweazu

Dr. Chikwe Ihekweazu is the National Coordinator/ Chief Executive Officer of the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control, Nigeria’s National Public Health Institute. Until July 2016, he was the Managing Partner of EpiAfric - a health consultancy firm that enables access to expertise in public health research and advisory services. Dr. Ihekweazu is an infectious disease epidemiologist and consultant in public health medicine with 20 years experience working in public health roles. Until early 2014 he was co-Director of the Centre for Tuberculosis at the South African National Institute for Communicable Diseases, Johannesburg, South Africa. Prior to this, he was a Consultant Medical Epidemiologist, working for the UK's Health Protection Agency, leading the South East Regional Epidemiology Team. Dr. Ihekweazu has undertaken several short-term consultancies for the World Health Organization (WHO), mainly in response to major infectious disease outbreaks (including two Ebola outbreaks) taking him to work in Geneva, Liberia, Malawi, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland, Turkey and Nigeria. Dr. Ihekweazu is a graduate of the College of Medicine of the University of Nigeria and has a Masters in Public Health (MPH) Programme from the Heinrich-Heine University, Dusseldorf, Germany. He started his public health career as an epidemiologist at the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin, Germany and subsequently as a Public Health Analyst with the National Health Service, in London, UK. He was then awarded a Fellowship for the European Programme for Intervention Epidemiology Training and subsequently completed his Public Health specialization in the UK. He is widely published in medical peer review journals. Dr Ihekweazu is on the board of the NGOs: Public Health Foundation of Nigeria, Nigeria Health Watch, Society for Family Health, Education as a Vaccine and on the Africa Policy Advisory Board of ONE. He is a TED Fellow and co-founder TEDxEuston.