Second Meeting of the DS-I Africa Consortium
29 October -2 November 2022

Prof Stephen Obaro (Participant)

Stephen Obaro MBBS, FWACP, MRCP(UK), FRCPCH, FAAP, PhD, FIDSA, FPIDSA is Professor of Pediatrics, Director of International Pediatric Research Program and Adjunct Professor with the Department of Microbiology and Pathology at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. He obtained his basic medical training at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, where he commenced his postgraduate training in Pediatrics before relocating to the United Kingdom. In addition to further training in clinical pediatrics, he obtained a PhD in Immunology at Imperial College, University of London. Upon completion of his clinical and graduate training immunology, he worked with the UK Medical Research Council Research Laboratories in The Gambia, as Head of Field Station where his team established surveillance program for pneumococcal disease in children that contributed substantive data to the formulation of the pneumococcal conjugate vaccine for developing countries and the understanding of the epidemiology of invasive pneumococcal disease in children. He obtained additional postgraduate training in the US in general pediatrics at Pittsburgh Children Hospital and pediatric infectious disease fellowship at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. He has established field studies in Nigeria to understand the epidemiology of bacteraemic syndromes in children and the risk factors associated with these infections, through funding support from the National Institutes for Health and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He is a trustee and co-founder of International Foundation Against Infectious Diseases in Nigeria (IFAIN), a non-governmental, not-for-profit organization that has established a platform for multidisciplinary projects in infectious disease and training for graduate students. The IFAIN laboratory network is also supporting research projects in Liberia, Ghana through the Joint West Africa Research Group (JWARG) and Rwanda.