Professor Aiah Gbakima

Board Chairman

Professor Aiah Gbakima received the Masters of Sciences in Public Health of Ph.D. from the School of Public Health, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  He did his Postdoctoral Fellowship Training in the School of Geographic Medicine, Department of Medicine Case Western Medical School in Cleveland, Ohio.  He was a Senior Fullbright Research Fellow at the Bloomberg School of Public Health Johns Hopkins University and was later appointed a Visiting Fellow at the same institution. 

Professor Aiah A. Gbakima was also Country Director of the USAID/Predict that took over the revised and accelerated Ebola Research activities in the country and working with the University of California, Davis and in collaboration with the University of Makeni (UNIMAK) in Sierra Leone. We employed about 18 staff members and trained them in safely collecting bats and collecting samples and measuring their wing-span and eventually testing them for Ebola. It was during these experiments that USAID/Predict was able to discover a new Ebola virus from bats for the first time in history (Bombali virus). Before then, only antibodies against the Ebola virus were detected in bats. Our resulted published in Nature Microbiology was a scientific first in the world, we also detected Marburg virus in bats in the country.

Professor Gbakima was the Country Director of Metabiota Inc. in Sierra Leone representing the headquarters in San Francisco, California and the office in Washington DC, a member of the CDC Vaccine Trial Data Management Safety Board (DMSB), Editor-in-Chief of the Sierra Leone Journal of Biomedical Research (SLJBR), member of the African Journal Partnership Project (AJPP), Chair of the Sierra Leone Health and Biomedical Research Association (HBIOMEDSL) and is an Adjunct Professor of Microbiology, College of Medicine and Allied Health Sciences (COMAHS), University of Sierra Leone. Prior to joining Metabiota Inc., Professor Gbakima was a consultant to the Global Fund HIV/AIDS, Malaria and Tuberculosis for a year and before that, he was the Vice Chancellor and Principal of the University of Sierra Leone (USL). Professor Gbakima was the Chief Academic and Administration head of the University of Sierra Leone, which constituted, the College of Medicine and Allied Health Sciences (COMAHS), Fourah Bay College (FBC) and the Institute of Public Administration and Management (IPAM). Professor Gbakima is a member of the West African Health Organization’s Scientific Committee (WAHO). He is also a founding member of the West African Health Research Network (WAHRNET), a scientific communication organ of WAHO. He is Co-Editor of the West African Journal of Research for Health (WAJRH), an organ of WAHO.