Folashade Adekanmbi

Folashade Adekanmbi is a Professor of Paediatrics at Olabisi Onabanjo University, Ago Iwoye, where she currently 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. Her work sits at the meeting point of clinical paediatric medicine and public health, and over a career of more than three decades she has built a research programme around a single, demanding question: why do newborns, children and adolescents in Nigeria fall seriously ill, and what can realistically be done, within stretched health services, to change that.

She read medicine at the University of Ilorin, graduating MBBS in 1991, and completed her residency in paediatrics at the Sagamu teaching hospital, where she was elected a Fellow of the West African College of Physicians (FWACP) in 2005. A Master of Public Health from Olabisi Onabanjo University followed in 2010, formalising the population-health perspective that runs through her work. Her clinical specialisation was deepened by paediatric nephrology training at the Lagos University Teaching Hospital and abroad, including a Master Class in Nephrology in India, alongside sustained training in paediatric HIV care.

Much of her early and most influential work concerns the survival of the newborn. In a sustained series of studies based at the Sagamu teaching hospital, she examined the conditions that most often prove fatal in the first weeks of life, among them admission hypothermia in high-risk newborns, neonatal tetanus, neonatal seizures and severe neonatal jaundice. Her study of point-of-admission hypothermia, together with a fifteen-year review of mortality from neonatal tetanus, drew attention to dangers that are at once common and largely preventable, and pointed toward practical responses, including locally fabricated, low-cost phototherapy devices and structured resuscitation training for nurses.

From this foundation, her research has broadened into several connected strands of child health. In paediatric nephrology she has characterised the patterns of kidney disease seen in hospitalised children, from congenital nephrotic syndrome and acute kidney injury to the common and under-recognised problem of childhood enuresis. In haematology she has investigated the complications of sickle cell disease in young children, including iron overload, iron-deficiency anaemia and lung function. And in HIV medicine she has evaluated prevention-of-mother-to-child-transmission (PMTCT) programmes and followed the health of HIV-exposed infants, asking how programme design and infant feeding choices shape their longer-term outcomes. Her twelve-year evaluation of 545 mother-infant pairs at the Sagamu teaching hospital documented a mother-to-child 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.

More recently, her work has extended into adolescent HIV and the often neglected question of mental health. 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, retention and viral suppression among young people living with HIV, and to qualitative studies of the depression, anxiety and stigma carried by adolescents living with HIV and their caregivers.

Her work has also extended beyond Nigeria into other international, multi-centre collaboration. She is a contributor to the Global Health Research Group on Children's Non-Communicable Diseases, whose cohort study of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on children with cancer linked frontline Nigerian data to a wider effort spanning low-, middle- and high-income countries.

A Fellow of the West African College of Physicians, she serves the wider profession as a postgraduate examiner for the College and as an external examiner for other Nigerian medical schools, and reviews for several biomedical journals. She holds membership of the Paediatric Association of Nigeria, the Nigerian Association of Nephrology, the Medical Women's Association of Nigeria and the Medical and Dental Consultants' Association of Nigeria. Across some sixty peer-reviewed papers, her scholarship has accumulated more than three hundred citations.

Across all of this work runs a consistent method and a consistent purpose: careful clinical observation, audit and implementation science, directed at turning evidence into care that holds up in the settings where it is needed most. Alongside her research she remains an active clinician and teacher, supervising resident doctors and postgraduate trainees in the Department of Paediatrics at Olabisi Onabanjo University.