Stephen O'keefe MD, MSc, MRCS, FRCP

Prof. Stephen O’Keefe, Director of the African Microbiome Institute (AMI), is an internationally renowned researcher with some forty years’ experience in nutritional gastroenterology. He also has an appointment at the University of Pittsburgh, where he holds a position as Professor of Medicine in the Division of Gastroenterology and Nutrition. He was born in Johannesburg and raised in Zambia, where his interest in nutritional medicine was kindled by visits during school holidays to rural health clinics with his father, a doctor in the health service. “It was on these trips that I saw how nutrition was one of the key things that affected health,” he says.

This interest led to training in Medicine (Guy’s Hospital, London) and Human Nutrition (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine), followed by Internal Medicine and Gastroenterology at Oxford and King’s College Hospital, and a fellowship in Nutrition at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After completing his training in gastroenterology, he returned to Africa, first working at King Edward 8th Hospital in Durban, followed by Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town.

He has subsequently spent nearly 30 years in the USA working as a clinical gastroenterologist and scientist supported by NIH R01 awards in his subspecialties of pancreatitis, malnutrition, and most recently the human microbiome. His collaboration with South African, British, Dutch, American, and Alaskan researchers has led to novel findings on colonic microbiome that explain why rural Africans rarely get colon cancer whilst African Americans suffer the highest incidence in the continental USA, and Alaska Native people have the highest recorded rate of colon cancer in the world. Key findings have been published in Nature Communications and Nature Reviews.