Clinicians, builders and lived experience, on one team.

Dr Isaac is a multi-award-winning medical doctor, PhD holder, researcher, innovator, author, and health policy leader who has worked in various global and national organizations that work in the healthcare, public policy, and social entrepreneurship space. He is the Founder of Slum and Rural Health Initiative (SRHIN), one of Africa's largest health NGOs that promotes quality healthcare to underserved communities using our unique Advocacy, Research and Technology (ART) approach. SRHIN is a non-profit with over 3,600 volunteers from about 11 African countries. Aside from being a US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) HIRe Modeling Fellow, and the UK-based Commonwealth Foundation Awardee, he has over 72 studies in reputable journals such as the LANCET journals, Journal of Global Health, etc He is a recipient of over 24 fellowships, awards, and/or grants including: -US Department of States' Mandela Washington Fellowship for Young African Leaders, -African Union Scholarship -Harvard Global Health Institute Grantee, - Neuromatch - Wellcome Trust -Women Deliver Young Leader -One Young World Managing Ambassador Africa & Middle East, -NIHR-RSTMH Grantee, Reckitt Scholar, - Tony Elumelu Foundation Grantee, -Grand Challenges Canada (GCC) Grantee, among others. He has worked/volunteered at UK-based One Young World, Canada-based Hospital for Sick Children, ONE Campaign, Australian-based Global Youth Mental Health Awareness, Pan African Reproductive Health Young Scientist Association, and US-based IYAFP, among others. Dr Isaac is passionate about adolescent and child health - especially digital health, artificial intelligence (AI), mental health, infectious diseases, NCDs and Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights (SRHR). Dr. Isaac is an African Union's Pan African University Scholar who was awarded a fully-funded Masters of Health Sciences (MHS) and he finished as the Best Graduating Student in his set in 2019. Driven by his deeply-rooted interests and experience in research, community leadership, and entrepreneurship, he co-founded SIMBIHealth App which delivers comprehensive behavioural & mental health information.

Dr. Shamsuddeen Muhammad is a Google DeepMind Academic Fellow and Advanced Research Fellow at Imperial College London. His research focuses on computational social science, multilingual NLP, and the development of resources and benchmarks for underrepresented languages, particularly in Africa. As a Senior Lecturer (Assistant Professor) at Bayero University, Kano, and a Visiting Professor at AIMS, he is passionate about advancing AI education and mentoring the next generation of African researchers. He co-founded HausaNLP(https://hausanlp.github.io), an open-source community pioneering NLP tools for the Hausa language, and founded the Arewa Data Science Academy(https://arewadatascience.github.io), which provides free, high-quality data science and AI training to students in underserved regions. His recent projects include leading efforts on hate speech and emotion detection datasets across African languages (e.g., AfriHate, AfriSenti, BRIGHTER), evaluating LLMs on cultural knowledge, and organizing shared tasks for African languages. He’s been honored with awards including the Google DeepMind Fellowship and multiple Best Paper recognitions at top NLP venues.

Musa Adekunle Ayanwale is a Senior Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Mathematics, Science and Technology Education, University of Johannesburg, South Africa. He holds a PhD in Educational Research, Measurement, and Evaluation, which positions him as an expert in assessment and psychometrics. His research interests encompass testing theories, instrument development and validation, psychometrics, generalizability theory-based reliability analyses, Q-methodology, structural modelling, computerised adaptive testing, and computational and network psychometrics. He also applies machine learning methods (supervised and unsupervised learning) and explores the use of artificial intelligence in education, particularly in assessment innovation, predictive analytics, and adaptive learning systems. His current work focuses on advancing technological solutions for educational assessment to make evaluation in Africa more effective and efficient. Dr. Ayanwale has received notable recognition for his scholarship. He holds a C2 NRF rating, confirming his status as an established researcher making significant contributions to his field. In 2025, he was honoured among the 82 University of Johannesburg researchers named in the World’s Top 2% Scientists list, compiled by Stanford University in collaboration with Elsevier.

Ezekiel Oladejo is an AI Engineer leveraging machine learning and NLP to address mental health and maternal health challenges in low-resource public health settings. At the AI for Low-Resource Public Health Application Center, I develop end-to-end AI solutions, from data pipelines and model training to deployment and evaluation, tailored for multilingual local datasets. He specializes in building robust, interpretable, and ethical AI systems for risk prediction, decision support, and digital health interventions, ensuring solutions are scalable and accessible to underserved communities. I collaborate closely with clinicians, researchers, and local stakeholders to turn real-world health challenges into actionable, high-impact AI solutions.

Miracle Adesina is a lived experience mental health professional committed to ensuring that people with lived experience are recognized not simply as beneficiaries of mental health services, but as partners in shaping research, policy, innovation, and service delivery. His work is grounded in the belief that mental health systems become more equitable, effective, and culturally responsive when they are designed alongside the people they are intended to serve. As Country Coordinator (Nigeria) at the Slum and Rural Health Initiative (SRHIN), Miracle leads the organization’s efforts to embed lived experience across mental health advocacy, implementation, research, and digital innovation. He currently leads SRHIN’s Lived Experience Working Group, bringing together people with diverse lived experiences to inform programme design, research priorities, digital health innovations, policy engagement, and knowledge generation. Through this platform, lived experience has become a core element of how SRHIN develops, implements, and evaluates mental health interventions across Africa.

Dr. Owoeye is the Chief Consultant Psychiatrist Special Grade one and Head of Clinical Services at Federal Neuro psychiatric hospital Yaba Lagos Nigeria. A mental health expert since 2003, certified addiction professional, a psychotherapist, a trainer and a mental health advocate. I obtained MBChB from Obafemi Awolowo university in 1994, FMCPsych. in 2003, MSc Clinical Psychology 2005 from University of Lagos, MPhil Clinical Psychology 2017 from University of Ibadan and PhD in clinical psychology from University of Lagos in 2019. I am a member of Nigeria Institute of Management with (MNIM). I have over 25 peer review publications.

Prof. Jegede is a Medical Anthropologist/Sociology and Bioethics. He is a professor at the University of Ibadan with over 30 years of teaching and research experience. He is a coI on the BridgELSI project among other research competencies. He is a member of the National Bioethics Committee of Nigeria, former Head of Department, Dean of Faculty and Chair of Research Ethics Committee; is the Director of Research Management office. He supports the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) as a social scientist in the Nigeria COVID-19 Research Consortium (NCRC). He was a member of the technical working group that drafted the National Code for Health Research Ethics and National Bioethics Framework and Policy. He is a member of the National Bioethics Committee and the National Steering Committee on Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs). Professor Jegede is a recipient of many scholarships, fellowships and prizes including The World Academy of Sciences Award in Social Sciences in 2020; the Nigeria Prize for Science in 2017, the MacMillan Nigeria Publishing Company Authors Merit Award in 2013; and the 2nd Worldwide Competition for Young Sociologists merit award in 1994.