Professor Fatima Kyari is the Registrar and Chief Executive Officer of the Medical and Dental Council of Nigeria (MDCN), where she is leading reforms in medical education, health workforce governance and professional regulation. A clinician, academic and public sector leader, she has built a career at the intersection of healthcare delivery, medical research, healthcare policy, implementation and institutional reform.

Before joining MDCN, she was pioneer Director of the Institute for Advanced Medical Research and Training (IAMRAT), University of Abuja. Internationally, she serves on the Board of Trustees of the International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness (IAPB) and as Chair of its Africa Region. She led the development of the Glaucoma Clinical and Research Network (Glaucoma-NET) at the International Centre for Eye Health, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, bringing together clinicians, researchers and policymakers across Africa to strengthen glaucoma care through collaborative research, simulation-based surgical training, capacity building and implementation of evidence-based practice guidelines. She has also played a leading role in adapting the IAPB glaucoma toolkit as Nigeria's national glaucoma management guideline, helping translate global evidence into national policy and practice.

Professor Kyari's career is driven by a commitment to building stronger public institutions that translate evidence into policy, policy into implementation, and implementation into better health outcomes for all.

As the 2026 AIG Visiting Fellow at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford, Fatima is examining how Nigeria's expansion of medical schools can be implemented as a strategic public sector reform that strengthens health workforce capacity, safeguards educational quality and positions Nigeria to participate more strategically in the global political economy of health, while shaping the healthcare workforce ecosystem and labour market. Her work seeks to generate practical policy recommendations that strengthen governance, regulatory stewardship and implementation of large-scale reforms in health and medical education.