Dr Niran Okewole

Doctoral Scientist

Niran’s PhD project involves investigation of the contribution of genetics to the complex health profiles in neurodevelopmental conditions. He is supervised by Professor Simon Baron-Cohen and Dr Varun Warrier, is funded by the Cambridge Trust and a Trinity-Henry Barlow studentship, and is a member of Pembroke College, Cambridge.

He has first degrees in Medicine (University of Ibadan, Nigeria) and Philosophy (Birkbeck, University of London); his previous postgraduate studies include master’s degrees in Child and Adolescent Mental Health (University of Ibadan, Nigeria) and Bioinformatics and Genetic Epidemiology (Cardiff University, UK).

Niran is a chief consultant psychiatrist, working in both child and adolescent psychiatry and general adult psychiatry, at the Neuropsychiatric Hospital Aro, Abeokuta, Nigeria. He co-leads the Africa Working Group of the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium, and is a member of the board of directors of the International Society of Psychiatric Genetics (ISPG), on which he represents Low- and Middle-Income Countries.

He also writes poetry, with two published collections, and plays club-level tennis.