Akinlolu Ojo, MD, PhD, MBA

In January 2016, Dr. Akinlolu (“Lolu”) Ojo was appointed as the Associate Vice President for Clinical Research and Global Health Initiatives at the University of Arizona Health Sciences in the Office of the Senior Vice President for Health Sciences.  Dr. Ojo came from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor where he served as Professor of Medicine and the Inaugural Florence E. Bingham Research Professor in Nephrology.  Dr. Ojo is an internationally recognized physician scientist with expertise in chronic kidney disease, kidney and kidney-pancreas transplantation and Global Health Research.  At the University of Michigan, Dr Ojo was the PI of research studies totaling >$70 million and he played leadership roles on major NIH-funded clinical trials and cohort studies including the African American Study of Hypertension and Kidney Disease (AASK), the Folic Acid Vascular Outcome Reduction in Transplantation (FAVORIT), the Chronic Renal Insufficiency Cohort Study (CRIC), the Adult-to-Adult Living Donor Liver Transplantation Study (A2ALL) and the Nephrotic Syndrome Study Network (NEPTUNE).  Dr. Ojo directed the Department of Medicine Global Health Research Program and the joint University of Michigan-International Society of Nephrology (UM-ISN) fellowship program to train nephrologists for low resource settings.  Dr. Ojo is currently the PI of the Human Heredity and Health in Africa (H3Africa) Kidney Disease Research Network – a research and training program that is conducting genetic studies on kidney disease in 8,000 participants through 10 academic medical centers in five countries in sub-Saharan Africa.  The H3Africa Kidney Disease Research Network is also engaged in the development of clinical and translational research infrastructure and research workforce capacity in Africa as part of a larger $76 million NIH-Wellcome Trust funded initiative to advance genomics research and develop clinical and translational research capacity in sub-Saharan Africa.  Dr. Ojo has served as the Chair of the Steering Committee of the H3Africa Consortium which is comprised of 24 research projects and >350 investigators from 37 African countries.  Dr. Ojo received his medical education from the University of Lagos, Nigeria and residency training in internal medicine at the University of Kentucky, Lexington.  He earned a Master of Public Health (MPH) degree in Global Health from the University of Alabama in Birmingham and completed nephrology fellowship, PhD in Epidemiology and the Master of Business Administration (MBA) at the University of Michigan.  Dr. Ojo has over 170 peer-reviewed publications and serves on editorial boards and on NIH study sections.  Dr. Ojo maintains active clinical research collaboration with investigators in Latin America, the Caribbean, West Europe and East Asia.  Dr. Ojo has mentored >20 research scientists and physician scientists and has been elected into several honorific societies including the American Clinical and Climatological Association (ACCA), American Society of Clinical Investigation (ASCI), and the Association of American Physicians (AAP).