John O. Olawepo MBBS, Ph.D.

I received my medical training in Nigeria and my postgraduate training in Public Health from the United Kingdom and the United States. I have subsequently focused my career on integrating chronic disease care into HIV programs in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). I am the PI for a pilot grant exploring the effect of community- and incentive-based approaches on the demand for sickle cell disease newborn screening in Nigeria. I previously served as the Program Lead on a five-year CDC-funded HIV care and treatment program (SUSTAIN [U2GGH000934]) across 13 states in Nigeria that screened over 266,000 women for HIV and linked 15,000 women identified with HIV to treatment. I served on the PMTCT National Task Team where we adapted the WHO HIV guidelines for national roll-out in Nigeria. As my career moved from program to research, I became the research manager for two NIH funded projects and subsequently became a co-investigator on a supplement grant from NIH, the Men’s Club [R01HD087994-01S1] designed to determine the impact of Men’s Club intervention on male partner’s knowledge of infant feeding options and intent to support their female partners on initiation and maintenance of exclusive breastfeeding. I currently co-lead the Nigeria Implementation Science Alliance (NISA) Model Innovation and Research Centers (NISA-MIRCs). This practice-based research network of 21 high-volume comprehensive treatment centers across the 6 geopolitical zones in Nigeria serves as implementation laboratories to test new strategies to improve health outcomes. On this grant, I will work with the PI Dr Ezeanolue and bring my program and research experience to lead NISA-SOAR Research Project-1 and the Implementation Laboratory to support the training of clinician and implementation practitioners in skills they need to design, implement and measure cancer prevention and control program effectiveness.