A clinician-scientist working at the meeting point of paediatric medicine and public health, with more than three decades devoted to the survival, kidney health and wellbeing of newborns, children and adolescents in Nigeria.
Folashade Adekanmbi is a Professor of Paediatrics at Olabisi Onabanjo University, Ago Iwoye, where she serves as Head of the Department of Paediatrics, and a Consultant Paediatrician, sub-specialising in paediatric nephrology, at the university's Teaching Hospital in Sagamu, Ogun State. She read medicine at the University of Ilorin (MBBS, 1991), was elected a Fellow of the West African College of Physicians in 2005, and completed a Master of Public Health at Olabisi Onabanjo University in 2010, with further training in paediatric nephrology and paediatric HIV care.
Her early and most influential work concerns the survival of the newborn: studies at the Sagamu teaching hospital of admission hypothermia, neonatal tetanus, neonatal seizures and severe neonatal jaundice, conditions that are at once common and largely preventable. Her research has since broadened into childhood kidney disease, the complications of sickle cell disease, and the prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV. Her twelve-year evaluation of 545 mother-infant pairs documented a transmission rate of 2.9 per cent, down from 7.1 per cent previously reported, and identified late enrolment into care as a key, modifiable risk.
As a site investigator for iCARE Nigeria, an NIH-funded collaboration with Northwestern University and the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago, she contributes to a multi-site trial of peer navigation and two-way text messaging to improve treatment adherence and viral suppression among young people living with HIV, and to studies of their mental health. She is also a contributor to the Global Health Research Group on Children's Non-Communicable Diseases.
She serves as a postgraduate examiner for the West African College of Physicians, an external examiner for other Nigerian medical schools and a reviewer for several biomedical journals, and remains an active clinician and teacher, supervising resident doctors and postgraduate trainees in the Department of Paediatrics.