Nutrition professor aims to boost The Gambia’s public health system with Fulbright scholarship

Nutrition professor aims to boost The Gambia's public health system with Fulbright scholarship

In January, Dr. Toyin Babatunde, an associate professor of nutrition science in East Carolina University's College of Allied Health Sciences, will head to Banjul, the capital of The Gambia, to help reign in the growing threat of poor diets to public health in West Africa.

The native of Nigeria was selected as the first recipient of a Fulbright scholarship in the college's nearly six-decade history. The Fulbright Program was established in 1946 to share American knowledge, scientific expertise and cultural achievements with cultures across the globe.

Babatunde has collected a string of degrees from around the world: her undergraduate education from the University of Ibadan in Nigeria, where she was born; a master of public health in the University of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica; and a doctorate in nutrition from Florida International University. Her work in the academy, teaching students, came after years of honing her craft in clinical setting.

"I used to be a clinical dietitian in Nigeria, Jamaica and the Bahamas before transitioning to academia, so this is like a second career," Babatunde said.

Seeing how sick so many adults were in the tropical band she lived in drove her to find ways to combat the silent killer that is poor nutrition.

She grew up knowing the impact that diet can have on the body. Her father was diabetic, and she struggled to get him to listen to the science behind the disease that made him sick.

"I wanted to go to medical school. I was good in the sciences," Babatunde said, but instead she pursued physical therapy. "But then I ended up in nutrition. One of my incentives was feeling that I could help my dad."

Working in hospitals she saw the skills she was collecting could be extended past the single person in front of her to whole populations. Chronic, diet-related disease is directly related to cardiometabolic risk, Babatunde said, which increases the likelihood of hypertension, which leads to heart disease - the No. 1 killer globally.

That strong thread of public health runs through all her education and clinical work, which ultimately brought her to eastern North Carolina.

Where a person lives is the strongest predictor of long-term health, Babatunde said. People living in areas where education is sparse and incomes are relatively low are often at greatest risk of consuming unhealthy foods, which is why she is taking her years of clinical and academic expertise back to Africa.

In 2019, she first pursued scholarship opportunities and was awarded a Carnegie Fellowship which saw her return to Nigeria, to "give back to my alma mater." During that trip she helped the medical school rethink their curriculum, to give future Nigerian doctors insight into the ways that the foods their patients eat impact their health. While in Nigeria she saw the similarities in the challenges faced by populations across sub-Saharan Africa.

"I saw that the food insecurity is very high in The Gambia and because that's my area of expertise I wanted to see what I could do to collaborate with the faculty there," Babatunde said.

The University of The Gambia has been a member of Global Partners in Education, a virtual exchange network ECU leads, for more than 20 years. In April 2024, ECU and the University of The Gambia signed a memorandum renewing the partnership between the two schools. Babatunde saw that as an opportunity to impact a nation that has little understanding of the way of nutrition can be used to as a preventative measure to positively impact public health.

"The fact that UTG has been such a longstanding partner of ECU is what provided Toyin with the opportunity to apply for her Fulbright," said Dr. Jon Rezek, assistant vice chancellor
for global affairs at ECU.

Dr. Jami Leibowitz, associate director of global affairs, said that relationship with UTG was critical to Babatunde's application being accepted.

"Given our relationship with UTG we were better able to help her connect to the right people who were very supportive of her application, which reflected well with the Fulbright committee," Leibowitz said.

The Gambia is bogged down with nutrition-related chronic disease, like in Nigeria, but their nutrition education programs are even less developed. Babatunde saw an opportunity and in 2024 applied for a Fulbright scholarship to help put Gambian public health education on the right track.

Babatunde's proposal to the Fulbright program was two-fold: teaching and research. She planned to duplicate the successful curriculum development she shepherded in Nigeria to build capacity in the nation's public health structure, especially for women of childbearing age and kids under 5.

"Those are the populations mainly affected. Whatever happens to children in those early years carries throughout their lifespan and can cause consequential problems like diabetes, hypertension and obesity," Babatunde said.

The second part of her Fulbright is research, which will be informed by the experiences she will have developing health promotion programs at the University of The Gambia.

While she speaks several Nigerian languages, none are shared with the Gambian people, so Babatunde said the is grateful that English is the language of education in The Gambia.

"I'm nervous. It's going to be a new place for me; I don't really know much about them," Babatunde said. "I'm excited, too, to meet the people and see what I can learn from them."

Babatunde will be in The Gambia by herself for half a year but is looking forward to visits from her husband. They are avid travelers, and she is excited to learn about the people from a new nation and how to help them find a new path forward to better public health outcomes.

"I tell my students that it is important to be a global citizen, to encounter others and have intercultural exchange. I'm hoping that maybe faculty and students from The Gambia can come here so we can learn from one another," Babatunde said.

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