Ph.D., Professor of Biology, University of British Columbia Okanagan

Dr. Emmanuel Twumasi Osei is a biology professor at the University of British Columbia. Dr. Osei had several career aspirations in life including an affinity for the military and priesthood, however, he decided to pursue a career in STEM. Dr. Osei did his first degree in Ghana, and he was one of the few to finish with a first-class BSc honours degree in biomedical laboratory technology. In Ghana during this degree, one is trained as a diagnostician, so Dr. Osei had the opportunity to work in various fields such as clinical Biochemistry, histopathology, microbiology, and hematology.

After completing his first degree, he was required to do a mandatory internship for the nation. He did his internship at a regional hospital facility as a biomedical scientist and during this time he realized that he wanted to further his education, so he began applying for various scholarships abroad including the Commonwealth Scholarship. The Commonwealth Scholarship is a grant that is offered by the Commonwealth to middle-to-low-income families to help these students pursue graduate studies in the UK. Dr. Osei was able to acquire a seat in this extremely competitive international program and had the opportunity to complete his master’s degree in the UK at an exclusively post-graduate university called Cranfield.

At this university, Dr. Osei was able to do his degree in medical diagnostics which is described as a marriage between biomedical science principles and the medical industry. This degree allowed him to realize that he has a knack for research as he enjoyed going into the depths of issues to build knowledge. This degree had two parts, the first part being lecture-based and the second being a research-based part that lasted 6-7 months. In the research portion, many research proposals across the UK were advertised, which made it an incredibly competitive process for the students. Dr. Osei was able to secure his first choice for a research topic, a project at the Open University in the UK in which he got to build three-dimensional in-vitro models of the brain. He would use collagen that has been isolated from rat tails to create three-dimensional gels. He would then embed cells from young rat pups into these gels and use the manufactured gel models to query various principles of early childhood diseases such as those found in premature infants and children with cerebral palsy.

After his master’s degree, Dr. Osei went back to Ghana to teach anatomy and cell biology as an assistant lecturer at a medical school. He then went on to receive a joint Ph.D. from a university in Holland and the University of British Columbia in Canada. During his Ph.D., Dr. Osei studied the interactions between the epithelial cells that line our airways and the fibroblast cells that build our lungs by constructing and using complex models. He was interested in the abnormalities that are present in these interactions when one has diseases such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and asthma, illnesses that currently have no known cure. By understanding these interactions, Dr. Osei states that we can identify targets to focus on in drug development. He continued this research into his postdoctoral studies and through his many models, he was able to identify the main mechanisms that contribute to the communications between the airway and the lungs. Currently, Dr. Osei continues to build upon this research in his lab at the University of British Columbia Okanagan by investigating how immune cells fit into the interplay of epithelial and fibroblast cells (E. T. Osei, personal communication, March 29, 2023).

Works Cited

Osei, E.T. (2023, March 29). Personal communication [Personal interview].

Osei, E. T. (n.d.). [Picture of Dr. Emmanuel Twumasi Osei]. The University of British Columbia. Retrieved August 29, 2023, from https://biology.ok.ubc.ca/about/contact/emmanuel-twumasi-osei/