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 address public health challenges in the West African nation.
Babatunde, a native of Nigeria, was selected as a recipient of a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program award for the 2025-2026 academic year — the first such award 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.
Dr. Toyin Babatunde poses with food models she will use when she travels to The Gambia in January to help address chronic health concerns by addressing poor diets.
Babatunde has collected a string of degrees from around the world: her undergraduate education from the University of Ibadan in Nigeria; 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 am excited and grateful to God to be selected for this prestigious award,” she said. “I used to be a clinical dietitian in Nigeria, Jamaica and the Bahamas before transitioning to academia, so this is like a second career.”
She grew up knowing the impact that diet can have on the body. Her father was diabetic, and she struggled to get him to modify his diet. Babatunde was good in the sciences, and helping him was part of her inspiration in pursuing a health-related career.
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 chronic diseases are strongly 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 a strong 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 was awarded a Carnegie Fellowship which saw her return to Nigeria, to “give back to my alma mater.” During that trip she helped redesign the dietetics curriculum of her host institution. While in Nigeria she saw the similarities in the challenges faced by populations across sub-Saharan Africa.
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. Food insecurity, a strong social determinant of health, is a national challenge in The Gambia, and Babatunde saw this opportunity to impact a nation that has limited infrastructure and nutrition workforce as a way to positively impact public health.
“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 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. Toyin Babatunde, associate professor of nutrition science, will spend six months at the University of The Gambia next year helping to develop nutrition education programs.
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 its 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 plans 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 UTG. She will use her clinical, teaching and research experience to strengthen the public health program in the Department of Public Health and Environmental Science and build the capacity of the country’s public health program. During the fellowship period, graduate students in the public health program will benefit from Dr. Babatunde’s mentoring expertise as they engage in research activities.
“I’m nervous and excited. It’s going to be a new place for me; I don’t really know much about the country, though I am also from West Africa,” Babatunde said. “I look forward to meeting the people and seeing what I can learn from them.”
Babatunde will be in The Gambia for six months and is looking forward to visits from her family. 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 to strengthen the institutional linkages between ECU and the University of the Gambia, providing an avenue for future collaboration, student-faculty exchanges, and potentially study abroad opportunities.,” Babatunde said.