Dr Chikwe Ihekweazu

Dr Chikwe Ihekweazu

Dr Chikwe Ihekweazu is an Assistant Director-General at the World Health Organization, (WHO) leading the WHO Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence. He has led several short-term engagements for WHO, mainly in response to major infectious disease outbreaks around the world, including two-time Ebola outbreaks, which took him to work in various African countries such as Nigeria, Liberia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Lesotho, and others. He was also part of the first WHO COVID-19 international mission to China, in February 2020.

Dr Chikwe has over 25 years of experience working in senior public health and leadership positions in several National Public Health Institutes, including NCDC, South African National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD), and the UK’s Health Protection Agency, and Germany’s Robert Koch Institute (RKI).

Before becoming WHO’s Assistant DG, Dr Chikwe was the first Director-General of the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) and served between July 2016 and October 2021. As Director-General, he led the agency through seamless transformation and directed effective response to significant outbreaks of viral diseases as well as the re-emergence of some including monkeypox and yellow fever. He was also at the vanguard of Nigeria’s COVID-19 response and management.

Read Also: Lanre Olusola

Previously, he was Managing Partner at EpiAfric, a public health consultancy firm. He was also the curator of the health policy advocacy platform: Nigeria Health Watch. Between 2011 and 2014, Dr Chikwe was Co-Director of the Centre for Tuberculosis at the South African National Institute for Communicable Diseases in Johannesburg, South Africa, and served as Consultant Medical Epidemiologist, working for the UK’s Health Protection Agency and leading the South East Regional Epidemiology team.

Born in Germany, he received a bachelor’s degree in Medicine from the College of Medicine, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and a master’s degree in Public Health from Heinrich-Heine University, Dusseldorf, Germany. In 2003, he was awarded a Fellowship for the European Programme for Intervention Epidemiology Training and subsequently completed his Public Health specialization in the United Kingdom.

Dr Chikwe is widely published in medical peer-reviewed journals in his field and sits on the board of the following NGOs: African Society of Laboratory Medicine (ASLM), Child Health and Mortality Prevention Surveillance (CHAMPS), Public Health Foundation of Nigeria, Health Watch Foundation, Society for Family Health (SFH), Education as a Vaccine (EVA) and the Africa Policy Advisory Board of ONE.

He is a TED Fellow and Co-founder, TEDxEuston and TEDxAbuja.