Biography

Dr. Kunle Kassim is Professor and Chair of the Microbiology Department in the College of Medicine at Howard University in Washington DC (USA). His research interests include microbial pathogenesis, antimicrobial drug development, maternal milk immunology and infectious disease epidemiology, all which he also teaches in various graduate and medical course offerings.

Dr. Kassim received his undergraduate, MSc and PhD degrees in Microbiology from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis in 1975 and a Master of Public Health (MPH) in Epidemiology in 1980 from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland (USA). He did his postdoctoral training in the Laboratory of Parasitic Diseases at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, followed by a research fellowship at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. He took up an appointment in 1978 as a Research Scientist for two years at the National Institute for Medical Research in Lagos, where he worked on malaria immunology and schistosomiasis.  He has undertaken several years of laboratory and field research in infectious diseases and epidemiology with grants from the NIH, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). These grants supported his studies on cerebral malaria, Burkitt’s lymphoma, sickle cell disease and maternal breast milk immunology. His research over the years also on the development of field diagnostic test for urinary shistosomiasis, impact of malaria and microbial infections on pregnancy in HIV positive women in Akure (Nigeria) and isolation and identification of bioactive constituents in Fagara and Pseudocedrela plant extracts against human malaria parasite, prostate and breast cancer cell lines was done in collaboration with colleagues at Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU) in Ile-Ife, Nigeria and the Pharmacology Department at Howard University. He was a grants reviewer for the NIH Antimicrobial Vaccines Study Section and a reviewer for the British Medical Journal and the Ethiopian Journal of Biomedical Sciences. Dr. Kassim was a member of the Howard University (HU) faculty that established in 1996 the summer training program HU medical, graduate and undergraduate students in tropical disease research at universities in Ghana, Ethiopia, Mali, Nigeria and the Cameroons. Also at Howard, he developed a Global Health course that introduces students to global health issues, epidemiological methods for control of disease outbreaks, design of community water and sanitation systems as well as strategies for developing and distributing vaccines against childhood infectious diseases.

Dr. Kassim brings his academic, research and field experiences into his classroom teaching through relevant case study discussions, thereby enriching the medical and post-graduate students with up-to-date valuable information and knowledge. With his grants, he has helped build a vibrant curriculum in international public health issues. He has trained several PhD students in his laboratory over the years and been a member of the medical faculty that has also trained thousands of medical students into becoming competent medical doctors. Findings of his cumulative research have been presented at national and international meetings and published in over 50 articles in peer-reviewed biomedical journals. 

As a result of his dedication and innovation, Dr. Kassim has received many honors and awards for his long-term career in teaching and research.  In addition to two Kaiser Permanente awards for Excellence in Teaching, he has earned multiple Teacher of the Year awards from the College of Medicine’s Student Council as well as mentoring awards from the American Heart Association and the NIH Summer Research Programs.