Professor Ellis Owusu-Dabo is a Professor of Epidemiology and Global Health, Consultant Public Health Physician, Researcher, and former Pro Vice-Chancellor of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Kumasi.
Previously, he served as Dean of the School of Public Health, where he introduced new programs, expanding the Master of Public Health (MPH) offerings from three to seven. He also served as Deputy Director and Director of the Kumasi Centre for Collaborative Research (KCCR) into Tropical Medicine for eight years. Professor Owusu-Dabo has secured and managed multi-million-dollar research grants from the European Union, National Institutes of Health (NIH), The World Bank, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), and several bilateral organisations.
His expertise spans resource mobilisation, research management, clinical trials, and community-based research. His research interests include pandemic preparedness, vaccine development, epidemic-prone diseases, and Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs). He leads KNUST’s Mastercard Foundation-funded Africa Higher Education Health Collaborative and served as Chairperson of its nine-member international Steering Committee (2023–2024). His leadership enabled training of over 2000 health workers across Ghana.
An advocate for inclusive education, he led the creation of five diploma programs tailored to individuals with disabilities. He has mentored over thirty PhD and post-doctoral researchers globally. His dedication to female mentorship has elevated many women to leadership in science and research.
With over 300 publications, 26,000+ citations, an h-index of 51, and i10-index of 156, he ranks among Ghana’s top five scientists. A Perelman International Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, Professor Owusu-Dabo serves on numerous boards and remains passionate about strengthening African health systems through innovation and collaborative research.
The KNUST Africa Health Collaborative has been honoured for its outstanding contribution to advancing research, innovation, and capacity building in health education during the 2025 College of Health Sciences (CoHS)
Fifteen health business start-ups have been awarded funds totalling $150,000 by the Africa Health Collaborative, KNUST, in partnership with the Mastercard Foundation. The fund is intended to provide these budding
Africa higher education institutions are well-positioned to advance the Foundation’s health strategy due to their unique concentration of professionals and talents, their mission to train the leaders of the future and to develop and leverage knowledge to create both global and locally contextualized solutions.
We will establish a network that is anchored in Africa and builds on existing networks to ensure local knowledge and expertise are prioritized to create exponential impact.
A networked approach allows us to cross borders and sector divisions to collectively address shared health sector challenges as well as local ones, leveraging the power of higher education institutions as sites of knowledge exchange, community collaboration, and cross-sector partnerships.
