Honorary Members

Carrie P. Hunter, M.D., M.P.H. is President and CEO of Oncology Consulting International (OCI), LLC, a cancer care management, research, education and training consultancy company dedicated to improving cancer, non-communicable diseases (NCDs), and health outcomes. She collaborates with partners on projects and programs to advance prevention and treatment research, and supports education and training initiatives to build workforce capacity for cancer control and health care delivery.

Dr Hunter is experienced in strategic planning and evaluation of complex heath issues and in working across diverse cultures. She is a graduate of New York University School of Medicine and is a board-certified medical oncologist. Post-graduate training was completed in internal medicine and haematology at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital (now the Brigham and Women’s Hospital) and in medical oncology at Dana Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, MA. She holds a Master in Public Health in Epidemiology from Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health, Baltimore, MD. She served as program director for the Community Clinical Oncology Program, Division of Cancer Prevention and Control, National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health (NIH), and as program director and project officer for the NIH Women’s Health Initiative. She has also worked in the private sector of the pharmaceutical industry.

Dr Hunter served on the Executive Council of the African Organisation for Research and Training in Cancer (AORTIC) (2000-2011) and was Vice President for the North America Region of AORTIC (2007-2011). She developed the AORTIC Strategic Plan. She was Chairperson of the AORTIC Scientific Program Committee for the 2003 4th International Conference on Cancer in Africa held in Accra, Ghana, which led to the re-activation and re-establishment of AORTIC on the African continent.

She is a member of Avon Foundation Scientific Advisory Board; the Board of the African Cancer Centre, Lagos, Nigeria; and the Board of Governors of New York University School of Medicine. She is co-editor of two books: Cancer in the Elderly (2000) published by Marcel Dekker, Inc., New York; and Treatment and Management of Cancer in the Elderly (2006) published by Taylor and Francis Group, New York. She served on the Global Health Council’s Roundtable on NCDs that supported civil society/NGO efforts at the U. N. High Level Meeting on NCDs in September, 2011.

Seth Ayettey is a Professor of Anatomy with a PhD from the University of Cambridge and an MBChB degree from the University of Ghana. His research interest lies in the study of the ultrastructure of vertebrate cardiac muscles with special reference to the transverse tubular system, innervation, cell junctions and distribution of cytoplasmic organelles. The Primary aim of these studies is to determine morphometric differences in cardiac cells of mammalian and non-mammalian vertebrate species and the possible relationship of these to design and function of the cardiac myocyte.

Professor Ayettey is a minister of the Presbyterian Church of Ghana and member of the Board of Directors of World Vision and of the Executive Committee of that Board, Chairman of the Prison Council in Ghana and Honorary Member of AORTIC Africa.

Christopher Williams, MD, FRCPC, FWACP, DABIM, is a dual citizen of Nigeria and Canada and had his bas ic medical education at the University of Munich, Germany. He obtained his postgraduate medical training at the University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada where he trained in Internal Medicine, followed by training in Clinical Haematology at the McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada and in Medical Oncology at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, NY, USA.

He then returned to Nigeria to work at the University College Hospital, Ibadan, Nigeria and was on the faculty of the College of Medicine of the University of Ibadan from 1978 to 1986. During this period, he served the institution as the Foundation Subdean of the Faculty of Basic Science and Pharmacy.

It was during this period that he teamed up with two senior African colleagues, Dr Victor Ngu of the Cameroon, and Dr Toriola Solanke of Nigeria, and his American mentor, James F. Holland, to found the African Organisation for Research and Training in Cancer (AORTIC), serving the organization as its Founding Secretary-General. In 2000 he was involved in the process of reactivating the then moribund AORTIC, thereby helping to create AORTIC International, which has recently succeeded in reactivating the Africa-based organization.

Dr Williams, who has practiced medicine in Africa, Asia, Europe and North America, has published about 100 scientific articles in peer-reviewed journals, abstracts in international conference proceedings and chapters in books. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the book “Breast Cancer in Women of African Descent”, which is about to be published by Spinger. He is a pioneer researcher in clinical retrovirology in Africa and was the first biomedical researcher to alert Africa’s most populous country, Nigeria, to the earliest epidemiological data of HIV/AIDS.

His work in Nigeria also encompasses the earliest attempt to establish Medical Oncology as a discipline in a major Sub-Saharan Hospital.

Sulma Mohammed; MS, PhD.
Dr. Mohammed earned MS and PhD degrees from Cornell and Purdue University, USA, respectively in Microbiology. She is a dual citizen of Sudan and United States of America. Dr. Mohammed is a Professor of Cancer Biology at Purdue University and Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at Indiana University School of Medicine. Dr. Mohammed was a Walther Cancer Institute Fellow, American Association for Cancer Research-Cancer Research Foundation of America- Prevention Research Fellow, and National Cancer Institute/National Cancer Institute, National Institute of Health fellow. Dr. Mohammed is a basic/transitional cancer scientist and her research focuses particularly in breast cancer in minority populations and African women living in Africa and examining breast cancer disparity, developing breast cancer animal model and deciphering the process of breast cancer metastasis. Dr. Mohammed also serves as a member of the African Diaspora Health Initiative (ADHI) Executive Committee to the African Union. Dr. Mohammed established ongoing research with her colleagues in Sudan at the Gezira University Cancer Center that cumulated in many publications. The latest of which published in Lancet Oncology and PODCASTed. See here: http://download.thelancet.com/flatcontentassets/audio/lanonc/2013/lanonc_april.mp3. The study focused on using local women volunteers to screen other women for breast cancer abnormalities. Using this culturally appropriate approach has resulted in detection of early breast cancer that was amendable to treatment.