Physician first, scientist by necessity
Six years of medicine in Cameroon taught me which questions matter. Johns Hopkins gave me the methods to answer them.
- Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Mercy Medical Center, Baltimore
- MD, University of Bamenda · MPH, Johns Hopkins
- English and French
- Self-taught pianist and church choir director
I grew up in a farming family in Cameroon's North West Region, and I am the first physician from my clan. At ten I nearly died of a fever, and my father renamed me Tiku, which means survivor. No health record shows it happened. That gap between what happens to people and what gets written down has shaped most of my work since.
I trained as a physician at the University of Bamenda. When the Anglophone crisis cut older patients off from care, I opened a small clinic while still a medical student. After graduating I reopened a hospital in Widikum that had been closed for six years, working with ALIMA, and later led a medical center in Bamenda with a large HIV program.
Reporting adverse drug reactions there is where my research questions started. How long does it take for a drug safety problem to reach a label? Who gets a treatment when insurance stops paying for it? Which hospitals look good on a scorecard for the wrong reasons?
A World Bank scholarship brought me to the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health for my MPH. I now study cancer surgery outcomes as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute for Cancer Care, Mercy Medical Center, and drug safety with G. Caleb Alexander at the Johns Hopkins Center for Drug Safety and Effectiveness.
My long-term goal is a population-based cancer registry for Cameroon's North West Region. Current national cancer figures are modeled estimates, and the hospital registries that exist count only the patients who reach a hospital. I want the region's cancer plan to rest on observed counts, collected by Cameroonian clinicians trained to run the registry themselves.
Open Dreams
Facilitator and peer mentor · Bamenda, Cameroon · 2021 to present
Open Dreams is a Cameroonian nonprofit that guides high-achieving students from low-income families to university admission and full scholarships. The first application I ever edited was my brother's. It showed me how many gifted students had no one to tell them what existed or to read their drafts. A physics teacher had done that for me when I read by candlelight and owned no textbook.
Each year I mentor about ten students through university and scholarship applications. I mark every draft, run mock interviews, and build school lists around what can be funded rather than what is famous.
One student cut the two years he spent running his family's farm after his father died. He called it a gap. I put it back. Since then I have stopped asking what my students lack and started asking what they have been taught to leave out.
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The CV has the complete list of positions, publications, and presentations.