Alex Ezeh has decades of experience in research, research capacity strengthening, and policy advocacy on a range of global health and development issues. He served as founding director of the African Population and Health Research Center (APHRC) and, over a period of 17 years, guided APHRC to become one of Africa’s foremost regional research center addressing population, health, education and development issues. He initiated and directed the Consortium for Advanced Research Training in Africa and the African Doctoral Dissertation Research Fellowship programs to strengthen doctoral training and the retention of academics at universities across sub-Saharan Africa.

Ezeh’s work focuses on urban/slum health, population dynamics in sub-Saharan Africa, and models to strengthen knowledge-based institutions in Africa. His research has highlighted the development implications of SSA’s population and urbanization trends, underscored the unique vulnerabilities slum populations face, defined the systems (education, health, economic, etc.) that best serve slum populations, and has ensured slum populations become more visible in national and global reports and data systems. His work on strengthening knowledge-based institutions is focused on addressing the undermined capacity of African institutions resulting from century-old systems of unequal partnerships with institutions in the global North.

Ezeh provides guidance to a range of institutions. In January 2021 he was appointed as a Member of the High-Level Advisory Board for Economic and Social Affairs of the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs. He also serves as a member of the WHO’s Human Reproduction Programme Alliance for Research Capacity Strengthening Advisory Board and University College London and Imperial College’s London Research Hub for Urban Sustainability, Health and Equity; and on the Visiting Committee of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He also serves on the Boards of Development Initiative and the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie). Ezeh has been part of several Lancet Commissions including the Rockefeller Foundation-Lancet Commission on Planetary Health, the Lancet Commission on the Future of Health in Africa, and he Co-Chaired the Guttmacher-Lancet Commission on Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights. He is also a member of the Vatican-Lancet-Mario Negri Commission on the Value of Life and the Lancet Nigeria Commission on Investing in Health and the Future of the Nation.

Ezeh is honorary professor of public health at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, and holds an honorary Doctor of Science from University of Ibadan (Nigeria) and KCA University (Kenya), and a doctorate in demography from the University of Pennsylvania, USA. He is the recipient of the World Academy of Sciences 2018 Prize for the Social Sciences and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and Royal Society for Tropical Medicine and Hygiene’s 2020 George Macdonald Medal.