Charles Agyemang - Biography#

Prof. Charles Agyemang is a Professor of Global Migration, Ethnicity and Health and Principal Investigator at Amsterdam University Medical Centres, University of Amsterdam; and an Adjunct Professor at the Department of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, USA. He received his PhD from Erasmus Medical Centre, University of Rotterdam, and Master degree at Edinburgh University Medical School. Prof. Agyemang is currently the Vice President of the Migrant Health section of the European Public health Association & Secretary of the Executive Council of the European Public Health Association; Scientific Chair of the Global Society of Migration, Ethnicity, Race & Health, and a fellow of the prestigious European Research Council (ERC) under the Consolidation Award programme. He is also a recipient of the prestigious VENI fellowship of The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO).

His research is focused on ethnic inequalities in health and non-communicable diseases (NCD) in low- and middle-income countries. Prof. Agyemang established the RODAM study on African migrants in three European countries (Netherlands, Germany & United Kingdom) and non-migrant Africans living in rural and urban Ghana (www.rod-am.eu) through the European Commission FP7 funding. This landmark study provided new insight into the effects of international and national migration on obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular diseases. Following the huge success of the RODAM study, Prof. Agyemang received a prestigious grant from the European Research Council (Consolidation) to transform the RODAM study into a prospective cohort (RODAM-Pros study) to investigate the genetic-environmental interactions mediating cardiometabolic diseases among African migrants. Prof. Agyemang is a highly productive scholar with over 350 research articles, reviews and book chapters, and edited several books.

He is member of the World Health Organisation (WHO) taskforce on NCDs in Migrants and was a also member and a rapporteur of the Planning Committee for WHO Global Consultation on Migrant Health. He is a member of The Lancet Racial Equality Advisory Board, and the European Hypertension Society Workgroup on Hypertension & Cardiovascular Risk in Low Resource Settings. Prof. Agyemang serves as a member on several scientific advisory boards. He is Section Editor for Journal of the American Heart Association (JAHA), an Associate Editor for Internal and Emergency Medicine, and serves as Guest Editor and Editorial Board member for several journals.

He is passionate about training the next generation of scientists and health leaders, and he has mentored several undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral students in Europe and Africa. He has also set up several training programmes including yearly summer school programme on the Art of Scientific Writing in Accra, Ghana where healthcare professionals and PhD students in Ghana and Amsterdam UMC, the Netherlands attend.

Besides his busy work, he is also very active in the migrant communities especially African community in Amsterdam. He and his team provide regular health education programmes for these communities to improve their health. He is one of the founding members of Your Health Is Your Wealth programme in collaboration with Pentecostal Council of Churches in the Netherlands – an initiative that provides health education to the migrant communities in the Netherlands.