Dr. Valentine Otang Ntui

MBBS (Sydney), FRACS (Paediatric Surgery)

Dr Valentine Otang Ntui is a citizen of Nigeria, a scientist at International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), Nairobi station, Kenya, and teacher at the Department of Genetics and Biotechnology, University of Calabar, Nigeria. He joined the services of the University in 2001 as Graduate Assistant and was promoted Senior Lecturer in 2015, teaching courses in Plant Biotechnology, Molecular Biology and genome editing, also researching in the field of Genetic Engineering and Genome Editing. He has attended a couple of local and international conferences. In 2010, he obtained Ph.D. degree in Plant Biotechnology (Plant Genetic Engineering) from Chiba University, Japan. From 2014 to 2017, he was a postdoctoral fellowship at the Centre for Desert Agriculture, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Prior to joining KAUST, he was a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) postdoctoral fellow at the Laboratory of Plant Cell Technology, Chiba University (Japan), where his main area of research was on the engineering of a variety of crop plants (cassava, potato, tomato, tobacco) for resistance to viruses using RNAi Technology. His research interests include molecular biology, plant-tissue culture and genetic transformation, in vitro development of polyploids and germplasm conservation. His current focus of research is on CRISPR/Cas9 mediated genome editing in plants for resistance to biotic/abiotic stresses. His notable awards include Japan Society for the Promotion of Science postdoctoral fellowship and Monbukagakusho (Government of Japan, MEXT) Ph.D scholarship. He is a member of International Association for Plant Biology and Society for In vitro Biology. Ntui has a total of 50 publications in international journals. .