Prof Osman Sankoh COR, commonly known as Mallam O., is the outgoing Statistician General and CEO of Statistics Sierra Leone (Stats SL). His term will end on 31st March 2023.
He is currently the Vice-Chair of the United Nations Statistical Commission. He served as Rapporteur of the UN Statistical Commission for two terms.
From April 2020 to June 2021, Prof Sankoh served Njala University, the second largest public university of Sierra Leone, as Acting Vice Chancellor and Principal. He now serves the university as an adjunct professor in the School of Community Health Sciences.
Before returning to Sierra Leone in 2018, he was the Executive Director of the INDEPTH Network of research centres running Health and Demographic Surveillance System (HDSS) and Comprehensive Health and Epidemiological Surveillance System (CHESS) sites in 20 countries in Africa, Asia and the Pacific.
Osman is currently a Mercator Fellow and Visiting Professor in the Heidelberg Institute of Global Health (HIGH) at the University of Heidelberg Medical School in Germany and holds a honorary full professorship position in the School of Public Health, Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, one of Africa’s topmost universities.
He is a member of several international scientific advisory boards including The Lancet Global Health, Global Health Action and Tropical Medicine and International Health.
His more than 120 peer-reviewed scientific publications have appeared in a range of international journals, with a current Google Scholar citation of 17,770 and h-index of 42, and has consistently been ranked as the topmost Sierra Leonean scientist in Sierra Leone since 2020.
He was born at the little village of Warima in Sierra Leone. He attended Tomlinson High School, Songo; Njala University College (now Njala University) in Sierra Leone; and the University of Dortmund (now Technical University of Dortmund) in Germany.
