AMBROISE WONKAM
Professor and Director of GeneMAP (Genetic Medicine of African Populations) Research Center
Dr. Ambroise Wonkam is Professor and Director, of the McKusick-Nathans Institute, and Department of Genetic Medicine, Johns Hopkins University, School of Medicine Baltimore, USA. He also hods a position of professor of medical genetics, and Director of GeneMAP (Genetic Medicine of African Populations), and immediate past Deputy Dean Research at the Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Cape Town, South Africa.
After a MD training from the Faculty of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, University of Yaoundé I (Cameroon), he completed a thesis in Cell Biology in the department of Morphology, and a specialist traing as medical geneticist at University of Geneva (Switzerland) and a PhD in Human Genetics (University of Cape Town, South Africa). His research interests and international recognition by the academic community are reflected in > 230 peer-reviewed publications.
Dr. Wonkam has been investigating numerous monogenic conditions of High burden in Africa, e.g. Sickle cell disease and inheritable hearing Impairment in Africa with focus on the use of genetics in public health intervention. He has a traceable record of studying genomic factors that affect the SCD phenotype, specifically studying HbF-promoting loci and co-inheritance of SCD and alpha-thalassemia in Cameroon and genomic variants affecting Kidney Dysfunctions. Moreover, his research has emphasized the huge genetic and locus heterogeneity in rare diseases in Africa including congenital hearing loss, and particularly genes variants, and novel genes, as well as innovative finding in the genetic architecture that will inform the pathobiology globally. In this application, he will build of what is presumed to be the World’s largest collection of Whole Exome Sequencing Data of individual living with Hearing impairment, with African ancestry. He has successfully advocated for more focus on Intellectual (syndromic and non-syndromic) by contributing to establish a section on Case report in Diverse Population in the American Journal of Medical Genetics (PMC7255818).Dr Wonkam was the principal investigator (PI) of a NIH funded H3Africa grant aiming to examine ethical issues relating to sickle cell genomics research in Cameroon, Tanzania and Ghana. Since 2017, He established the Sickle Africa Data Coordinating Center (SADaCC) to support the activities of the Sickle Pan African Research Consortium (SPARCo) site in Tanzania, Nigeria, Mali, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Ghana (https://www.sickleinafrica.org/). SADaC and SickleInAfrica have built significant infrastructure to contribute in many ways to the current proposal.
