Nsa Dada

Nsa Dada, MSc, PhD is the Founder and Lead of the Mosquito Microbiome Consortium, an international collaborative initiative for the advancement of mosquito microbiome research. She is a Global Health Research Consultant, and holds appointments at the Tropical Infectious Diseases Research Center, University of Abomey-Calavi, Benin; and the Nigerian Institute of Medical Research, Nigeria.

Working within the global health sphere, she has led or been involved in research at the intersection of the biology, evolution, ecology/microbial ecology, and control of parasites and disease vectors at leading research and public health institutions around the world, including the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, USA, where she was a resident American Society for Microbiology Postdoctoral Fellow, and subsequent Research Fellow. Her research efforts are now largely concentrated on host-microbe interactions within the context of disease vector biology. She currently leads a pioneering and award-winning research program that is aimed at understanding how environmental and mosquito-associated microbes contribute to the development of insecticide resistance in mosquito populations. She is a strong proponent of equitable 'Global North-South' research collaborations, and currently fosters several collaborative and/or research exchange initiatives between different institutions around the world.

Dr. Dada earned her Bachelor’s degree in Zoology from the University of Calabar, Nigeria, and her MSc degree in Biology and Control of Parasites and Disease Vectors from the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, Liverpool, England. She pursued a multidisciplinary doctoral research program at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Aas, Norway, and earned a PhD degree in Microbiology—focusing on mosquito-microbe interactions. She speaks some Thai, Norwegian and Spanish, in addition to English and at least 3 Nigerian languages. When she is not researching tropical bugs, she enjoys long walks in nature, volunteering within her community, creating new recipes and travelling the world.