MONROVIA – Renowned infectious diseases scientist and inventor, Dr. Dougbeh Christopher Nyan, M.D., is back in Africa on an annual volunteer teaching, lecturing, clinical, and public health duties in Liberia and other countries.
Dr. Nyan will be teaching high school-level biology at his Alma mater, Monrovia College and Industrial Training School again and lecturing college courses in medicine, science and public health at selected universities around the country.
The University of Liberia and Cuttington University Schools of Public Health, African Methodist Episcopal University, Lofa Community College, and Tubman University are among several higher academic institutions to benefit from Nyan’s volunteer services for a semester.
The German-trained medical doctor is also expected to conduct free symposia and workshops in diagnostics and infections-control at the Harbel Firestone Duside Hospital and the SDA Cooper Memorial Hospital.
Last year from August to December 2022, Dr. Nyan performed volunteer academic, clinical, and public health mission in few Africa countries including Ghana and Liberia where he gave a lecture at the Noguchi Memorial Medical Research Institute of the University of Ghana, the Monrovia College, Harbel College, and the Colleges of Health Sciences at the African Methodist University and the United Methodist University in Liberia, among others.
Since the end of Liberia’s brutal civil war, the NIH-trained scientist has performed yearly services beginning in 2005 when he helped train some of Liberia’s medical doctors at the A. M. Dogliotti College of Medicine of the University of Liberia where he lectured medical microbiology for a semester. During this time, Dr. Nyan also submitted proposals to the then incoming government for reactivating the Liberia Institute for Biomedical Research (LIBR).
During the 2014 Ebola outbreak, Dr. Nyan testified before the US Congress and advocated the establishment of the National Public Health Institute of Liberia and the African Center for Disease Control. He proposed a coordinated approach by Western countries in assisting the Ebola affected countries of Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea and Nigeria.
Dr. Nyan studied medicine at the Charite Medical Faculty of the Humbold University of Berlin in Germany and was trained as a scientist at the US National Institutes of Health and the University of Pennsylvania. He worked as a scientist at the Naval Medical Research Center and the US Food and Drug Administration.
He is the world acclaimed inventor of the Rapid Multiplex Real-Time Pathogen Diagnostic Test (the NYAN TEST) which simultaneously detects and identifies 3 to 7 infections using just one test. Dr. Nyan has been granted three US Patents for his invention, the third being granted in October 2022.
Dr. Nyan is chief medical and scientific officer of Shufflex Biomed, a biotechnology company he founded in 2015 that is developing diagnostic testing kits for infectious diseases.