Basile Njei, MD, MPH, PhD, assistant professor of medicine (digestive diseases), began his medical journey as a child in Cameroon. A childhood friend acquired hepatitis B, which developed into liver cirrhosis and eventually early-onset liver cancer, and Njei felt determined to learn more about it. Raised by two teachers, he was the first in his family to go into medicine.
This path would not be without challenges. Njei grew up in the English-speaking part of Cameroon, but when he started at the only medical school in the country, he had to study in French. Despite these obstacles, he succeeded in school, eventually obtaining a scholarship to pursue a master’s degree in public health at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.
Although he loved research, Njei wanted to maintain his interest in clinical medicine as well. This drove him to a medical residency at the University of Connecticut. He wanted to pursue hepatology and realized the best way to study liver diseases was by starting with digestive diseases and pursuing gastroenterology (GI) fellowship training. It was during this training that Njei started working with Joseph Lim, MD, professor of medicine (digestive diseases) at Yale School of Medicine (YSM), who guided him to a fellowship at YSM under the guidance of Michael Nathanson, MD, PhD, Gladys Phillips Crofoot Professor of Medicine (Digestive Diseases) and professor of cell biology.
“The Yale Liver Center is arguably the best academic liver center in the country,” Njei said, highlighting that it has the greatest amount of funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) out of all the U.S. centers and is one of six in the U.S. that the NIH has funded for more than 20 years. This stood out to him when applying for a fellowship. “It was also one of the only places to give me the option of earning a PhD during training,” he noted.
After a year of general GI training, the second year of fellowship allowed him to pursue research in hepatitis C; Njei was still inspired by his childhood friend’s disease. Initially, he looked at new treatments. It was an exciting time for this research because new treatments could, for the first time, cure the disease. His work also focused on how these new medications could be used effectively among U.S. military veterans, examining both cost-effectiveness and clinical outcomes. It was excitement for this work that led Njei to the Investigative Medicine Program, a YSM program for medical trainees to pursue a PhD during training. Through this program, Njei focused on data science, examining how to improve liver outcomes using big data at the VA hospital.
Njei was pursuing a PhD while completing a full-time medical fellowship. When his dad showed signs of dementia, he moved to Maryland to take care of him, pausing his PhD studies while still working as a travel doctor. This allowed him to work at different hospitals, caring for communities that didn’t have a GI physician or were understaffed. He would spend the next five years between Delaware, Maryland, and Ohio, caring for patients in these areas while caring for his father. After his father’s passing in 2022, Njei returned to Yale to finish his PhD.
An adjunct professor when he completed his fellowship in 2017, Njei joined the YSM faculty in 2023 as an instructor and became an assistant professor in the fall of 2024. These days, his research still focuses on U.S. veterans. He recently received a career development grant from the VA and funding from one of the parent grants of Amy Justice, MD, PhD, C.N.H. Long Professor of Medicine (general medicine) and professor of public health (health policy), to work on the Million Veteran Program, which collects genetic information from veterans in the U.S.
Njei is combining genetics and artificial intelligence (AI) to improve clinical outcomes, detect liver disease, and identify genetic and clinical predictors of liver disease. His work has already developed a publicly available AI tool to assess the risk of steatotic liver disease. He is currently the co-director of the International Medicine Program in the Section of Digestive Diseases, through which he collaborates with the U.S. embassy in Cameroon to improve medical education and integrate AI into health care in Africa.
This work has been a long time in the making. “Coming from Sub-Saharan Africa, which has some of the highest rates of some chronic diseases, where my father was a math professor, I started to think in numbers from an early age. This pushed me towards statistics and data science, and I now focus more on prediction modeling,” said Njei. He’s passionate about common sense solutions and strongly believes that “every problem has a simple solution.” In fact, “the more complex the problem, the simpler the solution,” he says.
“Once you find the solution, you can change the world. Sometimes, when I want to give up, I ask myself, ‘If you don't do it, who is going to do it? It's probably going to be you based on what you've been able to acquire.’” He mentions an African saying he learned back home in Cameroon: “There are no shortcuts to the top of a palm tree.’” Njei seems determined to keep climbing.
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