In 2022, I interned at LAUTECH Teaching Hospital in Ogbomoso, Nigeria, elbow-deep in the chaos of a bustling pediatrics ward. The air smelled of antiseptic and sweat, and my days blurred into nights of reviewing investigations and chasing charts. That is where I met Gbolahan Olatunji, MD, FRSPH [a current MPH student at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health], a fellow intern with a sharp mind and a restless edge. Over a lukewarm chat in the call duty room, we swapped frustrations about medical school. How it churned out doctors like us but left our curiosity stranded.
"What if every student had a mentor to run to with their research ideas?" he asked, his eyes glinting.
That question stuck. A year later, in 2023, his classmate in medical school, Emmanuel Kokori, MD who recently matched into the US residency program, had a similar conversation with us. Over a WhatsApp call, the three of us breathed life into the Emerging Researchers Network (ERN). A scrappy bid to light a path we had never had. Recently, I was nominated as a 2024 Research Hero by Wiley, a nod that has pushed me to tell what we have been doing to lift research among Nigerian medical students, a story that is still unfolding.
I had seen the pattern up close in my undergraduate days at Ladoke Akintola University of Technology. Nigeria trains doctors who can handle a ward full of emergencies, but research? That is a rare bird. In a country where communicable and noncommunicable diseases hit hard, just a few medical students find someone to show them how to ask the big questions: like why rural clinics run dry of epilepsy meds, how brain cells fix up after a stroke, or how they can publish. There was no access to labs for medical students; where there were, the labs were often ghosts, the mentors stretched thin, and the curriculum said,
"Fix what is in front of you, pass exams and not what is unanswered."
I had felt that pull myself, scribbling ideas in the margins of my notes but finding no one to point me toward a journal or a hypothesis.
ERN started in 2023: a WhatsApp chat with ten of us, scattered across schools, swapping free online resources—YouTube stats tutorials and open-access papers. No professors, no fancy tools—just us teaching and mentoring each other. It is remarkable what possibilities exist amid like-minded people, however inexperienced they might be. Power blinked out, data crawled, but we kept at it.
Our first win was small but electric: Gbolahan pitched an idea on Nigeria's proposed bill on the emigration of doctors. We huddled over voice notes, piecing them together. When it was accepted in The Lancet, he called me from a noisy ward, ecstatic, where he was undergoing his mandatory national youth service. That tiny triumph cracked the door, suddenly, faculties who had never noticed us were texting, "Well done," and offering help.
ERNs bloomed fiercely from that WhatsApp seed, stretching across Africa and the Global South, roping in hundreds of students with mentors who got it. We still lean on WhatsApp group chats and calls, and students who had dodged research now dive in. I am convinced that this is what it means to be innovative: achieving results even in the absence of a robust structure. Some, like Adetola Babalola, spun our late-night discussions into a US graduate school slot at the Kornberg School of Dentistry at Temple University. Others nabbed US residency slots, UK training slots, winning grants, and flashing papers we coaxed to life. The real jolt? Nigeria's medical students are stirring—they are not just swallowing textbooks; they are itching to ask, dig, and fix.
Perhaps one day I will compile a dossier of testimonies from students, doctors, and public health scholars whose lives ERN has touched, but for now, I will spotlight a few—like Adetola, whose journey from our WhatsApp chats to a US graduate school slot at the Kornberg School of Dentistry at Temple University captures what is possible when you dare to start.
Joining ERN strongly enhanced my understanding of systematic reviews and meta-analysis, which helped me transition and settle better into graduate school at the Kornberg School of Dentistry, Temple University, in Philadelphia. I secured a research assistantship position on an NIH-funded study with my faculty. Finally, I relate well to the courses we are taught due to the past projects we have completed. For example, I applied the knowledge from our project on stem cell therapies in stroke to the class on stem cell therapy in periodontal diseases.
Adetola Babalola, Masters Student at Kornberg School of Dentistry at Temple University, US
The Global South is brimming with medical students capable of tackling some of the toughest health challenges—malaria, stroke, sickle cell anemia—but they need a nudge. ERN has shown that with the right support, they can ask bold questions and find real answers. Back in that LAUTECH ward, Gbolahan and I could not have imagined Adetola’s success or John Aboje, a fourth-year medical student at Benue State University, securing a grant from Decentralized Science Nigeria to study bacteriophage therapy against ESKAPE pathogens. Yet here we are—ERN is no longer just an idea. It is a movement.
What has settled into my bones from this, and maybe it will strike a chord with you, is how it all comes down to a few truths. We kicked things off with what was ours: a WhatsApp group, ten scrappy students, no money or professors in sight. It was just us, stubborn enough to start anyway. Then we linked up, first with our little cross-school crew, piecing together ideas, and later with global friends who turned our nothing into something tangible, showing me you have got to reach out and find your people. We learned to share the rope, too, when one of us climbed, we all did because this is not a solo climb, it is a haul for everyone. And when the power blinked out, or the net crawled, we rolled with it, bending to the breaks, finding ways to keep the fire alive.
ERN began as a flicker. Now, it is a blaze. And we are just getting started.
Nicholas Aderinto, MD, is a Nigerian and UK-licensed medical doctor and early-career researcher interested in neurology. With an H-index of 16, he ranks top among the world's early-career researchers. In 2023, he co-founded the Emerging Researchers Network (ERN) during his internship at LAUTECH Teaching Hospital, sparking a research movement for medical students across Africa and the Global South.