CHINWE OCHU
Infectious Diseases Warrior
DIRECTOR, PREVENTION PROGRAMMES AND KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT DEPARTMENT NIGERIA CENTRE FOR DISEASE CONTROL (NCDC)
Dr. Chinwe Lucia Ochu is a medical doctor with over 24 years’ experience as a clinician. She has MBBS from Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Nigeria (1996) and MPH from University of Liverpool, UK (2016). She worked as a Clinician for close to 20 years with the Ahmadu Bello University Teaching Hospital, Zaria were she played the role of a Chief Medical Officer in the Family Medicine Department.
She currently works with Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) as the Acting Director Prevention, Programmes & Knowledge Management and as the Head of Research. NCDC is Nigeria’s National Public Health Institute with the mandate to protect the health of Nigerians through prevention, early detection and control of infectious diseases of public health importance. She represents NCDC at the National Lassa Fever Research Consortium and National Health Research Technical Working Group. She is a member of the Body of Experts of Central Bank of Nigeria’s Health Sector Research & Development Intervention Scheme; a member of the College of Experts, DHSC/UKRI Global Effect on COVID-19 (GECO) Health Research, a member of the Research Functional Working Group and Sustainable Production Group of the Presidential Task Force on
COVID-19. She supervises the infection prevention & control (IPC) programme, antimicrobial resistance (AMR) programme, risk communication, and
Nigeria Field Epidemiology & Laboratory Training Programme (NFELTP) at NCDC.
She represents NCDC in the Ebola Steering Committee of the Infectious Disease Data Observatory (IDDO) whose aim is to improve the research capacity of countries affected by Ebola. She has represented Nigeria in international discussions that border on the advancement of accelerator 5 of SDG3 (R&D, Innovation and Access). She was part of the health product development, implementation and funding partners deliberation on tackling bottlenecks that impede access to health innovation and was a speaker at the 2019 World Health Summit. She represents Nigeria at the Uniting Efforts for Innovation Access & Delivery (UEIAD), a UNDPJapanese Government-GFID convened partnership. She is a collaborator of Global Burden of Disease (GBD) and a reviewer for scientific journals and research funders including the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), UK. She is the Principal Investigator of the US CDC-funded ‘Advancing Infectious Disease Research across Nigeria (AIDRAN)’ project; Project Director of the US CDC-funded SERSPlus (Strengthening Epidemic Response Systems Plus) and ACEPRIN (Advancing Capacity for Epidemic Preparedness and Response in Nigeria) projects.
She is the convener and National Coordinator of the Nigeria COVID-19 Research Consortium. Her major career goal is to facilitate the entrenchment of good science with collaborative research in Nigeria and in the African Continent.