Dr. Okobi E. Ekpo joined the College of Medicine and Health Sciences at Khalifa University in 2021, as an Assistant Professor in Anatomy and Cellular Biology. Prior to this, he had held faculty positions at the University of the Western Cape, in Cape town, and the University of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg, South Africa. He was also an Adjunct Faculty in Human Biology at Pima College, during the Fall Semester 2017, while serving as a Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence in Tucson, Arizona, USA. Overall, he has over 20 years’ University teaching and research experience at different ranks.
Dr. Ekpo obtained his doctoral degree in Anatomy from the University of Pretoria, South Africa in 2008, and received additional research training in neuroscience research at Loma Linda University in California, Missouri University in Columbia, USA, as well as the Katholieke University, in Leuven, Belgium. His research focuses on developing experimental models of neurodegenerative diseases, brain tumours and primitive neuroectodermal tumours, and involves the use of techniques in neurobiology, immunochemistry and histomorphometry to study disease mechanisms and evaluate the effectiveness of neuroprotective, disease-modifying, and therapeutic strategies in these models. In the past 10 years, Dr. Ekpo has worked on many research projects involving neurotoxicity, ischemic stroke, Parkinson’s diseases and diabetes-induced neurodegeneration. He has also supervised/co-supervised 17 MSc and 10 PhD students.
Dr. Ekpo has published over 50 peer-reviewed journal articles, presented at international conferences. He is an alumnus of the International Brain Research Organization (IBRO) schools; a member of the American Association for Anatomy (AAA), the Society for Neuroscientists of Africa (SONA) and the International Society for Neurochemistry (ISN).
