Offiong Aqua holds a joint appointment as a Clinical Associate Professor in the departments of Occupational Therapy, Physical Therapy, and Communicative Sciences and Disorders.
Born in Nigeria, he received his M.D. from the Faculty of Medicine at Friendship University, Moscow, Russia in 1986. His post-graduate training at the same University was in Facio-Maxillary Surgery.
For more than a decade, he was a faculty member at Mercy College, Dobbs Ferry, NY where he helped establish programs in Occupational Therapy and Physical Therapy, and served as Co-Chair, Department of Natural Sciences. He also served as adjunct faculty at New York Medical College, Valhalla, New York before joining the faculty at New York University.
He is a pivotal member of the heath section of NYU Africa House, a research institute that among other things focuses on global African health care issues.) On a NYU health care grant, in 2007, he helped develop an academic partnership between the Ghana Ministry of Health and New York University at Ghana. This partnership resulted in the launching of the Steinhardt School's (Department of Occupational Therapy) first health-related course abroad Jan 2008 "A Global Disability Course" under the auspices of New York University Campus in Accra, Ghana.
In 2006, Dr. Aqua received a Teaching Excellence Award from the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development. He is presently working with six senior faculty members from the NYU School of Medicine and the NYU Wagner School of Health Policy on establishing a joint collaboration with different organizations in Ghana including the Noguchi Medical Research Institute, the University of Ghana School of Public Health, the Ghana Health Ministry and Korle-bu Teaching Hospital in Accra. The focus of the collaboration is building training and research capacity in the areas of emergency medicine, health systems and prevention of non-communicable diseases.
Professor Offiong Aqua successfully conducted a Health System Audit for Akwa-ibom State Government in Nigeria. Akwa-ibom State is the #1 producer of petroleum (oil) in Nigeria. This audit (system of assessment) is currently used for healthcare planning in that region. He is, in addition, working with another senior faculty member from the NYU School of Medicine on a program proposal to institute a Functional Health Care System in the oil producing region of Nigeria (pop = 40 million). The main feature of this program is academic training and international clinical education.
