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Bennet Omalu Photo
Bennet Omalu Photo

Bennet Omalu Biography

Bennet Omalu is a Nigerian-American physician, forensic pathologist, and neuropathologist who was the first to find and publish information on chronic traumatic encephalopathy in NFL players. He eventually became the chief medical examiner for San Joaquin County, California, and is now a professor in the department of medical pathology and laboratory medicine at the University of California, Davis. Bennet Omalu Pathology is his current position as President and Medical Director.

How old is Bennet Omalu? – Age

How old is Omalu? He is 53 years old as of 30 September 2021. He was born Bennet Ifeakandu Omalu in 1968 in Idemili South, Nigeria.

Bennet Omalu Education

At the age of three, Omalu began primary education and was accepted into the Federal Government College Enugu for secondary school. He began medical school at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, when he was 16 years old. After receiving his Bachelor of Medicine and Surgery (MBBS) in June 1990, Omalu moved to Seattle, Washington in 1994 to complete an epidemiology fellowship at the University of Washington.[citation needed] In 1995, he moved to New York City to join Columbia University’s Harlem Hospital Center for an anatomic and clinical pathology residency training program. Omalu has a total of seven advanced degrees and board certifications under his belt.

Omalu holds seven advanced degrees and board certifications and later received fellowships in pathology and neuropathology through the University of Pittsburgh in 2000 and 2002 respectively, and a master of public health (MPH) in epidemiology in 2004 from the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health, and a master of business administration (MBA) from Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University in 2008.

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Bennet Omalu Nationality | Ethnicity

What ethnicity is Omalu? he belongs to the black ethnicity/heritage, he was born and raised in Idemili South, Nigeria, and she holds African American nationality.

Bennet Omalu Family | Parents

Omalu is of Igbo descent and was born as the sixth of seven siblings (previously “Ibo”). His family was forced to flee their home in Enugu-Ukwu, a largely Igbo hamlet in southeastern Nigeria, during the Nigerian Civil War. They returned two years after Omalu’s birth. Omalu’s mother worked as a seamstress in Enugu-Ukwu, and his father worked as a civil mining engineer and community leader. “He who knows, speaks,” says the surname Onyemalukwube. The surname Omalu is a diminutive of Onyemalukwube, which means “one who knows, speaks.”

Bennet Omalu Married | Wife

He is happily married to Prema Mutiso, who is from Kenya. They have two children, Ashly and Mark, and live in Elk Grove, California. He is a devout Catholic.

Bennet Omalu Ne Worth

He has an estimated net worth of $1.5 Million.

Bennet Omalu Books

Journalist Jeanne Marie Laskas wrote on Omalu’s efforts to study and promote CTE over NFL opposition in a GQ magazine article in 2009. Laskas expanded the essay into a book, Concussion (Penguin Random House, 2015), which was adapted into a drama film of the same name. Will Smith’s character, Omalu, is the key character in the film. Despite the fact that the film purports to be “based on true events,” it has been panned for errors. Despite this, the film’s production led to the establishment of an Omalu Foundation to further CTE and concussion research.

Bennet Omalu Career

Dr. Bennet Omalu “routinely exaggerates his successes and drastically overstates the known risks of CTE and contact sports,” according to a January 2020 piece in The Washington Post. On January 28, 2020, Omalu responded to Will Hobson’s essay with a response titled “We Are Becoming a Nation of Lies.” Truth Doesn’t Have a Side: My Alarming Discovery about the Danger of Contact Sports, written by Omalu, was published by HarperCollins in August 2017. Play Hard, Die Young: Football Dementia, Depression, and Death, which he released in 2008, was his first book.

Until December 2009, the NFL did not officially acknowledge the relationship between football concussions and long-term neurological consequences. Dr. Malachi Omalu received the Distinguished Service Award from the American Medical Association in 2016 after publishing the first documented case of traumatic brain injury (CTE) in a living individual in 2011. The NFL’s executive vice president of health and safety policy testified before Congress in March 2016 that the league now believes there is a link between football and CTE. Six professional wrestlers were diagnosed with CTE after their deaths, according to a lawyer who represented over 60 wrestlers in a class action case against WWE.

The autopsy of former Pittsburgh Steelers player Mike Webster by Omalu in 2002 raised awareness of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a brain condition caused by repeated head trauma. Webster has struggled with mental and cognitive disabilities, poverty, mental problems, depression, drug abuse, and attempted suicide. Using specialized staining, Omalu detected massive accumulations of tau protein in Webster’s brain, which affect mood, emotions, and executive functioning in a similar fashion to Alzheimer’s disease. In 2006, Dr. Malachi Omalu published a second Neurosurgery research based on his results in the brain of Terry Long, a former NFL player who committed suicide in 2005 after suffering from depression. According to him, tau protein concentrations were more in line with “a 90-year-old brain with severe Alzheimer’s.”