Who is Dimie Ogoina – the physician named among Most Influential People of 2023?
TIME Magazine, on Thursday, April 13, 2023, released its annual list of 100 most influential people of 2023. Two Nigerians made the list – Nigeria’s president-elect Bola Tinubu and Dimie Ogoina, a Professor of Medicine and Infectious Diseases at the Niger Delta University (NDU), Baylesa State.
TIME, an international magazine, releases the list of the world’s most influential people every year.
Ogoina was named on the list of 15 Innovators alongside French footballer Kylian Mbappe, CEO of the Walt Disney Company, Bob Iger, among others.
Following its tradition where a renowned person writes the profile of individuals on the list, Anne Rimoin, a professor of epidemiology at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) wrote Ogoina’s profile.
Rimoin described Ogoina, an infectious-disease physician, as “a passionate champion for global health equity”.
Who is Ogoina and how did he make the list of world’s 100 most influential people of 2023?
Here’s what we know about him:
Ogoina, who studied medicine at Ahmadu Bello University (ABU), Zaria, Kaduna State, told The Lancet Infectious Diseases that he attended high school in Lagos where he discovered his aptitude for mathematics and sciences.
He did his residency training with Geoffrey Onyemelukwe, a Professor of Medicine and Immunology at ABU, and taught medical students at ABU. Ogoina worked as a lecturer/consultant physician at the Bingham University Teaching Hospital (BHUTH), Jos, Plateau State before moving to Niger Delta University (NDU) and the NDU Teaching Hospital (NDUTH) Bayelsa where he is currently the Chief Medical Director of NDUTH. He is also the current President of the Nigerian Infectious Diseases Society.
Ogoina, along with his team at NDUTH, diagnosed and managed the first reported case of monkeypox in Nigeria in 2017, which was the first reported case in the country in nearly 40 years. His documentation of data which helped develop strategies to combat the global spread of the virus in 2022 earned him global recognition and a place on TIME 100 list of Most Influential People of 2023.
“Recognising the importance and potential implications for global spread, he persisted, documenting the potential for sexual transmission of Mpox and publishing the data in high-impact scientific journals. As the global Mpox outbreak unfolded in 2022, Dimie’s insights became critically important to developing better strategies to prevent and control outbreaks.” Rimoin, the UCLA professor of epidemiology, wrote in TIME.
The TIME 100 is not the first global recognition Ogoina has received in the past year. In August 2022, he was one of the 175 physicians and scientists honoured as Fellows of the Infectious Diseases Society of America (FIDSA). In December 2022, he was named in Nature’s 10 people who helped shape science in 2022.
Ogoina joins the list of Nigerian physicians earning global recognition and putting the country on the global stage with their exploits in science and medicine.
In 2021, Nigeria’s Dr Chikwe Ihekweazu, the epidemiologist and public health physician who led Nigeria’s fight against COVID-19 in 2020, was appointed the pioneer head of the World Health Organisation (WHO) Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence in Berlin, Germany.
Ihekweazu, who was named on Neusroom 100 list in 2020, left his position as the Director General of Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) in 2021 to join the WHO as Assistant Director-General for Health Emergency Intelligence.
In 2016, Prof Oluyinka Olutoye, a pediatric surgeon, became a global reference point in medical excellence, after leading a team of fetal surgeons to operate on a 23-week-old fetus. The baby got healed and continued to grow until she was finally delivered at 36 weeks.
Photo: KC Nwakalor—The New York Times/Redux
