Adebowale A. Adeyemo

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Adebowale A. Adeyemo is a Nigerian physician-scientist and genetic epidemiologist who studies how genes influence diseases, especially obesity, heart and metabolic disorders, and health issues in children. He is the deputy director and chief scientific officer of the Center for Research on Genomics and Global Health at the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI).

Education and training: Adeyemo earned an MBBS from the University of Ibadan in 1987, graduating with top marks in anatomy and a prize in surgery. He completed a pediatrics and genetics residency at University College Hospital, Ibadan (1989–1994). He did a bioinformatics postdoc at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology and completed a genetic epidemiology fellowship at Loyola University Chicago (1999–2000).

Career: He joined Howard University in 2003 to work in genetic epidemiology at the National Human Genome Center. He moved to NHGRI as a staff scientist in 2008 and became an associate investigator in 2016. He is now the deputy director and chief scientific officer of NHGRI’s Center for Research on Genomics and Global Health.

Research: Adeyemo’s work focuses on the genetics of complex diseases, especially cardiometabolic disorders and childhood disorders. He led several pioneering studies in African populations, including the first genome scan for obesity in Africans, the first genome-wide linkage analysis for serum lipids in Africans, and studies of West African genetic structure. He contributed to the first genome-wide association study for hypertension and blood pressure in African Americans. His work also covers the genetics of orofacial clefts, where he helped identify IRF6 mutations in African families with Van der Woude syndrome and popliteal pterygium syndrome. He is involved in congenital heart defect research in Nigeria, enrolling affected children and their parents for genomic analyses to build a local data set.

Leadership and service: Adeyemo co-chairs the H3Africa Genome Analysis Working Group and serves on the H3ABioNet Scientific Advisory Board. He helped create NHGRI’s electronic atlas of birth defects for diverse populations.