A Nigerian health communication scholar, Abdulmalik Lawal, has graduated from the University of Nevada, Reno, United States of America, earning 10 major academic honours for research, science communication, and public health scholarship.

Lawal completed a Master of Arts in Media Innovation with a focus on health communication and became the university’s Outstanding Graduating Student and Outstanding Graduate Student Researcher of the Year.

In the list of awards and honours the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) obtained yesterday, the Nigerian scholar also received the Outstanding Graduate Student Award from the university’s Reynolds School of Journalism.

This makes him one of the few students to simultaneously receive all three distinctions.

Lawal also won the Thesis Award of the Centre for Advanced Media Studies (CAMS) for his graduate research on antimicrobial resistance in Nigeria.

Other recognitions included the Rittenhouse and Hedges Journalism Scholarship for excellence in science communication and the Overall Best Research Poster Presentation Award across several colleges of the university.

In his reaction, Lawal said he was “highly delighted to achieve the academic feats”.

He added: “It is one thing to produce good research; it is another to produce research that speaks directly to the conditions under which real people get sick, make decisions about their health, and either find help or do not.

“Everything I have done has been oriented towards that second thing.”

Lawal was also selected as an Investigative Reporters and Editors Fellow and received the National Association of Science Writers Award and Conference Fellowship for excellence in science communication.

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He had additionally received a Graduate Student Association Travel Grant and was selected by the Hitchcock Project for Science Visualisation to attend the 2024 National Association of Science Writers Annual Conference.

The recognitions reflect a research profile spanning health communication, behavioural public health, science communication and digital media.

During his studies, Lawal published peer-reviewed articles, presented research at national and international conferences and contributed to health message processing studies at an eye-tracking media laboratory.

He also worked on a state-funded opioid response communication project and participated in a cross-national research collaboration involving James Madison University and the U.S. Department of State, examining healthcare stigma in Nigeria and South Africa.

Lawal said his work was driven by the belief that many public health problems were rooted not only in medicine but also in communication failures shaped by economic and social realities.

“The communities I study are not hard to reach because they are indifferent to their health.

“They are hard to reach because the systems meant to serve them were not designed with them in mind. My research is about changing that,” he said.

The scholar is expected to continue his academic journey at the doctoral level after securing admission into a top university for advanced studies in communication and health behaviour.

Lawal is also the Co-founder and Director of the African Centre for Health and Crisis Communication, a non-profit organisation established in 2025 to address public health challenges through evidence-based communication, health education and crisis response initiatives.

His work focuses on how social ecological determinants affect access to information and its influence on health decisions and behavior, especially among marginalised communities. (The Nation)

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