Collaboration after graduation

Since graduating in 2015, Dr Bolajoko continued to advance his career within the National Veterinary Research Institute (NVRI) in Vom, Nigeria. He was promoted to Chief Veterinary Research Officer following his successful completion of the MSc IAH, and subsequently worked as Assistant Director of the Veterinary Public Health and Preventive Medicine Division, and currently as Director of Diagnostic Services. 

Dr Braam completed the MSC IAH in 2014 while she was working with the Netherlands Embassy to Somalia, and after working for over a decade in consulting with several UN agencies, returned to academia to pursue a PhD on zoonotic disease dynamics at the University of Cambridge, which she completed in 2023. Since then, she completed a fellowship at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence, and worked as Assistant Professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), before starting a role with the WHO on climate change, migration and health.

The collaborative project was funded by a small grant from Cambridge-Africa, for which the two IAH alumni collaborated with Dr Charlotte Hammer at the Disease Dynamics Unit at the University of Cambridge, to conduct a one-health study in Plateau State. A team of local investigators conducted over 100 interviews, and deployed participatory tools, including open-ended focus group discussions, transect walks, mapping exercises, calendars and matrices to make visible determinants of animal and human health. The researchers found that changes in land use and conflict have increasingly affected patterns of mobility, with pastoralist movement often associated with zoonotic disease transmission. Rather than a direct outcome of population movement, however, animal, human and zoonotic disease drivers are complex and influenced by a range of socio-economic and environmental factors.

The project underlines the importance of including social science in one-health approaches, as inclusive, transdisciplinary, multilevel approaches to animal and human disease require contextualization of the interlinkages of (im)mobility and health, and underlying vulnerabilities to disease.