Prof. Nyarkotey

Professor Raphael Nyarkotey Obu, a dis­tinguished naturopathic Professor and an esteemed advocate for traditional and complementary medicine, has made history by becoming the first naturopath in Africa to be called to the Gambia Bar.

Known for his exception­al dedication to advancing healthcare through both legal and technological frameworks, Prof. Nyarkotey is pioneering a new era in traditional and naturopathic medicine.

At just 39 years old, he is already transforming health­care across the continent and using his legal expertise to shape a regulatory framework for traditional and comple­mentary medicine, bringing a new level of professional credibility and public trust to the field.

In addition to his recent legal accomplishment, Prof. Nyarkotey serves as the pres­ident of Nyarkotey University College of Holistic Medicine and Technology, Ghana’s first naturopathic medical school, which he founded to provide education in holistic health and technology.

His leadership extends fur­ther: he led a team to develop Ghana’s first National Occu­pational Standards in natu­ropathy and holistic medicine at the HND and BTech levels under the Commission for Technical and Vocational Edu­cation and Training (TVET).

These achievements, along with his work as General Secretary of the Ghana Alter­native Medical Practitioner Association (GAMPA) and as part of the research advocacy team for the World Naturo­pathic Federation in Canada, underscore his commitment to raising standards and advancing the professional development of alternative medicine across Africa.

In the Gambia, Prof. Nyarkotey has support­ed traditional healers and pioneered evi­dence-based naturo­pathic medicine. He also used his legal training days to raise awareness of Gambia’s forgotten herbs and made them popular through his scien­tific writing.

He has authored so many legal com­mentaries on the regulatory legislative framework on tra­ditional and natu­ropathic medicines in the Gambia and Africa.

“With my legal qualifi­cations, I aim to work with various African governments and health organisations to create a unified framework that supports traditional and complementary medicine,” said Prof. Nyarkotey Obu.

“There is a growing demand for these practices, yet the lack of regulation often leads to misuse and public skep­ticism. My goal is to bring about a change in how these treatments are perceived and implemented, safeguarding public health and honouring African traditions,” he added.

Prof. Nyarkotey is not only a renowned Naturopath, but also doubles as a Chartered Health Economist and Char­tered Management Consul­tant.

He is also pursuing a sec­ond MPhil/PhD in Law and Development at the Institute of Development and Technology Man­agement (IDTM) in Cape Coast, Ghana.

His research focuses on med­ical negligence and Alterna­tive Dispute Resolution (ADR), an area of critical impor­tance for African healthcare. By pro­moting ADR, he aims to provide pathways for fair, non-litigious resolutions, protecting both practitioners and patients within traditional medicine.

Prof. Nyarkotey is also at the forefront of exploring Artificial Intelligence (AI) in traditional and naturopathic medicine, investigating ways AI can revolutionise the de­livery and personalisation of natural medicines.

This approach promises new, tech-enhanced treatment options for underserved com­munities, enabling traditional healers to leverage data-driv­en insights for better patient outcomes.

As a deeply committed Christian, Prof. Nyarkotey bal­ances his professional pursuits with a strong personal faith. His determination and leader­ship have made him a trailbla­ser, setting a new standard for traditional and naturopathic medicine in Africa.

His upcoming consultancy firm aims to unite healers and legal experts, offering regula­tory and technological sup­port, as well as legal protec­tion for traditional healers.

Prof. Nyarkotey’s journey, from founding Ghana’s first naturopathic school to join­ing the Gambia Bar, reflects his drive to secure a place for traditional and naturo­pathic medicine in Africa’s healthcare landscape, and building a future where it is both accessible and regulat­ed. His visionary leadership is helping ensure that traditional medicine will be a credible, trusted, and vital part of healthcare across Africa.

 In the 1990s, astronomers discovered two distant, mas­sive galaxies that had com­pletely stopped, or quenched their star formation. The discovery marked a complete shift in everything astrono­mers thought they knew about how galaxies formed.

Massive galaxies like the Milky Way took several billion years to form. But those new­ly discovered galaxies did so in just a fraction of that time.

“The discovery meant that these galaxies were older than the age of the universe, which is physically impossible,” says Jacqueline Antwi-Danso, the NSERC Banting Postdoc­toral Fellow at the David A. Dunlap Department for Astron­omy & Astrophysics.

“When we look at the formation histories of these distant quenched galaxies, the observations suggest that they formed too quickly and too early compared to what we see in cosmological simula­tions.”

Antwi-Danso is tackling one of astronomy’s biggest chal­lenges in her search to find the earliest distant quenched galaxies in the universe. She is particularly interested in how these galaxies formed and when they stopped forming stars.

Astronomers have discov­ered several more distant, quenched galaxies at increas­ingly earlier periods in the universe’s history. These gal­axies are more massive than the Milky Way and yet formed within a billion years of the Big Bang (which happened nearly 14 billion years ago). In other words, they formed their stars extremely rapidly, unlike any galaxy observed in the present-day.

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So, what does this all mean for astronomers? The extreme star formation processes implied by these observations of distant quenched galaxies are uncomfortably close to the limits permitted by galaxy formation physics. Therefore, trying to understand these objects in more detail is a high priority research area for astronomers.

Massive galaxies like the Milky Way have up to a trillion stars and are characterised by luminous, spiral-like arms of active star formation. Meanwhile, distant, quenched galaxies are composed of old stars and look like relics: small orange-red blobs. This is because their light has been “stretched out” to infrared wavelengths due to the ex­pansion of the universe, which also makes them fainter and harder to spot.

At U of T, Antwi-Danso is building on significant findings from a study she participated in as a PhD student at Texas A&M University. Using the 8-metre telescope at the Gemini South Observatory based in Chile, the FENIKS collaboration surveyed large areas of the sky to increase the chances of finding these rare massive galaxies. They designed and installed two new imaging filters on the telescope to push the bound­ary of what was possible with ground-based infrared tele­scopes. The survey led to two critical discoveries.

The first was the identi­fication of two new distant quenched galaxies. The discovery confirmed existing knowledge about the for­mation histories of distant galaxies, “namely, that these galaxies form too early and too quickly based on what theory predicts,” Antwi-Danso explains.

The study also highlighted that astronomers can reliably use ground-based telescopes to observe distant quenched galaxies as far back as 12.5 billion years into history of the universe. To detect them at earlier times than this, space-based data is required.

Additionally, astronomers are rethinking long-standing models of galaxy formation as they observe distant quenched galaxies with supermassive black holes at their centers emitting energetic radiation.

This is important, Ant­wi-Danso says, because the differing models for light emission from stars and super­massive black holes can affect estimates of the physical properties of these distant galaxies.

As more questions arise, there is an increasing need to ensure the accuracy of the physical properties of distant quenched galaxies derived from modeling their observa­tions. Fortunately, there have been significant technological advancements to address this need.

Harnessing the power of space-based technology

The next stages of Ant­wi-Danso’s research involve further exploration of those two distant galaxies she dis­covered from Chile. To do so, she’s leveraging the power of the James Webb Space Tele­scope (JWST).

Distant galaxies are hard to detect because their emit­ted light is shifted to infra­red wavelengths, where the earth’s atmosphere blocks most of the light. The sky in the infrared is about 10,000 times brighter than the typical distant massive galaxy. This makes it extremely difficult to detect the most distant quenched galaxies using ground-based telescopes.

The JWST – which launched in December 2021 – is about 100 times more sensitive than the largest ground-based infrared telescopes and can observe galaxies in a fraction of the time of its predeces­sors.

In fact, it has doubled the number of spectroscopic ob­servations of the most distant, quenched galaxies within only two years of operation. Before its launch, astronomers had spectra of only 35 of these galaxies observed within the first two billion years of the universe’s history.

To further observe those two galaxies, Antwi-Danso will use data from the JWST to ex­amine their spectra – the light emitted by these galaxies over a range of wavelengths – which can reveal information like chemical composition. Insights will help provide a more accurate understanding of their formation histories to compare with updated cosmology simulations, and, hopefully, offer new an­swers about possible tensions between theory and observa­tions.

Additionally, Antwi-Danso is part of the Canadian NIRISS Unbiased Cluster Survey (CA­NUCS), a multi-institutional collaboration that uses gravi­tational lensing — a phenom­enon where a massive object acts as a cosmic magnifying glass — to study the building blocks of the earliest galaxies.

Within that collaboration, Antwi-Danso is also a re­searcher on the Technicolor Survey, which employs mul­tiple filters on the JWST’s Near-Infrared Camera to observe quenched galaxies at wavelengths that are inacces­sible from the ground.

“We want to find galaxies that contain the first gen­erations of stars, and then model their observations with galaxy formation models to infer their physical properties and star formation histories,” Antwi-Danso says.

With the technological advantages provided by the JWST to push the boundaries of distant galaxy observations, Antwi-Danso’s research will provide valuable insight into understanding how early gal­axies came to be.

“We’re really excited to see where the results lead and to compare those observa­tions with current theoretical predictions for these distant massive galaxies.”