Harvard and Northwestern Universities, through the Building Research and Innovation in Nigeria’s Science (BRAINS) initiative, have awarded the College of Medicine, University of Lagos (CMUL), a research grant of $3.2 million.

The Deputy Vice Chancellor, Academic and Research, University of Lagos (UNILAG), Prof. Babajide Alo disclosed this during the BRAINS Inaugural Meeting recently in Lagos.
Alo who represented the Vice Chancellor, UNILAG, said in his welcome address “we are happy this is coming at this time, because our colleagues can tap in on this capacity building, and this makes us a little happier.”

According to him, this is not a Nigerian university type of project, but rather UNILAG partnering with two American Universities as well as National Intelligence Agency (NIA) in the United States.

The grant, which is for a period of five years, intends to train junior faculty of CMUL in research in the field of Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) and infectious diseases, neuroscience, bioinformatics and genomics, community medicine and biomedical engineering.

He further said that it is also for the purpose of building the CMUL in taking matters of research and innovation to a higher level.

In the same vein, the Chairman Medical Advisory Committee (CMAC), Dr. Olufemi Fasanade who also represented the Chief Medical Director, Lagos University Teaching Hospitals (LUTH), noted, research is very important to us at LUTH and that is why we have committed a lot of goodwill, funds as well as efforts to promote research among the members of staff who are honorary consultants of LUTH.

LUTH is firmly committed to training researchers and raising standard in research, he added.
Fasanade explained; my strong believe is that, at the end of this programme, steps to closing the yearning gap between the developed countries and we the developing ones in the area of research will be approached, such that we can also proffer home grown solutions to our own local problems.

“As we are all aware, there is Lassa fever outbreak already in Nigeria, and it is important that we are able to tackle such problem through research that is directed to solving problems in our community and the nation at large.”
Also present at the meeting was Prof. R. Murphy of the Northwestern University, who said in his address that, “this partnership offers great opportunities and many unique programmes and the goal is to develop independent researchers capable of sustaining extremely well funded research projects.”

Murphy revealed how long it took for the primary grant to get to UNILAG, and partly attributed to being the first time.
“The Northwestern University Partner lamented that one of the things “we are going to do that is relevant to this grant is a sandwich training, part of the junior faculty are allowed to go abroad for 12 weeks for biomedical clinical laboratory epidemiological behavior research.”

Prof. P. Kanki also of the T.H Chan School of Public Health, Harvard University, pointed out that over the course of the five years of the Medical Education Partnership Initiative (MEPI), programme, the founders recognized their goals were too broad and they needed to focus on research capacity.

And that is why when the request for proposals came out for this programme, (MEPI 2), they focused on junior faculty with the goal of developing their skills and capacity to perform high quality research, Kanki said.
Speaking with the Provost, CMUL, Prof. Folashade Ogunsola, she said one of the problems we have in Nigeria is the absence of good quality data.

That is why essentially research will help us to identify the problems, we are in health care, so what we are trying to do is build some kind of researchers that will actually give us the truth, Ogunsola stressed.

The CMUL Provost told journalist, if this goes on, we will start to see a critical mass of research that address problems.
She stressed, many times in research, we talk about funding, but funding is not going to solve the problem, if we do not have good research knowledge and do not know how to conduct one, then funding is waste.

Ogunsola noted; lots of things we call research are not research, so even if they throw money at us, it is not necessarily going to improve the quality of our research.

Though she identified poorly equipped laboratories and inadequate funding as challenges, she further said, if government brings the money, it is not the money that will immediately translate into research, but rather how to get the people acquire the needed knowledge.

She however explained; when we get this kind of big grants, it helps us do our work well, as it aids more collaboration with people to accelerate development.

The rationale for BRAINS is that, in the university, the teaching does not come before the research, but the ultimate goal is to begin to see the impact on health. Beneficiaries of this grant include lecturers from senior lecturers downward, but everybody will get training.