Elected: 2017
Country (Nationality)
Ghana
Discipline
Biosciences
Bio
Professor Mensa-Wilmot one of the world’s experts on the molecular, cell, and chemical biology of Trypanosoma brucei, a parasite the causes human African trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness). He is Head of the Department of Cellular Biology at the University of Georgia (Athens, Georgia, USA) (http://cellbio.uga.edu/directory/faculty/kojo-mensa-wilmot ), where he also leads the Chemical Biology Group (https://cbg.uga.edu ). He chairs the Southeastern Chemical Biology Symposium (https://cbg.uga.edu/chemical-biology-symposium/ ). At the National Institutes of Health (USA), he is a charter member of the Drug Discovery and Resistance Study Section (National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases), and a member of the Board of Scientific Counselors for the National Institute of Child Health and Development (NICHD).
Recognized as a Burroughs Wellcome New Investigator in Molecular Parasitology early in his career at the University of Georgia, Kojo continues to make significant contributions to the molecular biology of Trypanosoma brucei (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=mensa-wilmot+k+%5BAU%5D ). Further, his laboratory has discovered several compounds that are being developed into lead drugs for the treatment of human African trypanosomiasis (https://news.uga.edu/hat-drug-kojo-mensa-wilmot/ ). The molecular mechanisms of these drugs against trypanosomes are being explored in Kojo’s laboratory with grants from the National Institutes of Health (USA) (https://news.uga.edu/nih-awards-uga-researchers-26-million-to-fight-african-sleeping-sickne/ ).
Kojo received a BSc (HONS) from the University of Ghana (Legon). For his doctoral work, he worked on mechanisms of DNA replication with Professor Roger McMacken (Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health). Kojo was a Rockefeller Foundation postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Professor Paul Englund (Johns Hopkins School of Medicine) where he studied molecular biology of the African trypanosome.