Chikwe Ihekweazu, MPH, MBBS

Dr. Chikwe Ihekweazu is an Assistant Director General at the World Health Organization (WHO), leading the WHO Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence.

Prior to this, Dr. Ihekweazu was the first Director-General of the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) and led the agency between July 2016 and October 2021. He acted as Interim Director of the West Africa Regional Centre for Surveillance and Disease Control from January to December 2017.

Dr. Ihekweazu trained as an infectious disease epidemiologist and has over 25 years’ experience working in senior public health and leadership positions in several National Public Health Institutes, including NCDC, South African National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD), the UK’s Health Protection Agency, and Germany’s Robert Koch Institute (RKI). Dr. Ihekweazu has led several short-term engagements for WHO, mainly in response to major infectious disease outbreaks around the world. He was part of the first WHO COVID-19 international mission to China, in February 2020.

Dr. Ihekweazu is a graduate of the College of Medicine, University of Nigeria and has a Masters in Public Health (MPH) from the Heinrich-Heine University, Dusseldorf, Germany. In 2003, he was awarded a Fellowship for the European Programme for Intervention Epidemiology Training (EPIET) and subsequently completed his Public Health specialisation in the UK. He is widely published in medical peer review journals. Dr. Ihekweazu is on the board of the NGOs: African Society of Laboratory Medicine (ASLM), Child Health and Mortality Prevention Surveillance (CHAMPS), Public Health Foundation of Nigeria, Health Watch Foundation, Society for Family Health (SFH), Education as a Vaccine (EVA) and the Africa Policy Advisory Board of ONE. Dr. Ihekweazu is a TED Fellow and co-founder TEDxEuston.