Vice Chancellor & Principal

Prof. Lebbie is actively involved in teaching and supervising undergraduate and graduate students, especially in areas that border on his research interests. The main thrust of his research concentrates on human interactions with natural ecosystems, and understanding the consequences on our society in the Upper Guinean Forests of Liberia and Sierra Leone. His academic research and teaching interests include: the biodiversity and cultural anthropology of sacred groves; tropical plant ecology; ethnobotany of medicinal plants; ecological surveillance and molecular diagnosis of hemorrhagic fever viruses and arboviruses in Sierra Leone; ecotourism & protected area management; environmental sustainability in conflict and post-conflict situations (displacement and refugees); and understanding the context within which health, disease, traditional knowledge and medicinal plants converge in providing wellness.

Prof. Lebbie is also the Head/Curator of the National Herbarium of Sierra Leone, and his interest in botany has led to active collaboration with the Royal Botanic Garden at Kew (UK), This collaboration resulted in several new plant discoveries. In 2014, he collected an herbarium specimen of rattan (Eresmopatha drandsfieldii) under the collection number (Lebbie, A 2590), with accompanying fruits. The fruits of this Palmae turned out to be the first known collection of this specimen to be brought to the attention of the scientific community, even though the plant had been described for over one hundred years without its flowers and fruits. In the same year, he also collected a specimen of Araceae (Lebbie, A 2601) known as Stylochaeton pilosus, which had been recorded in the early 1940s but had not been collected again for nearly 70 years, and this collection turned out to be a very rare specimen. In 2017, Prof. Lebbie collected the first known specimen of Lebbiea grandiflora (Lebbie, A 2721) in the family Podostemaceae, which was named after him as its discoverer, and the first such African genus of Podostemaceae to be described in over 30 years. This discovery was published in 2018 in the journal Plos One, and resulted in TV interviews in the UK as well as an interview on “BBC Focus on Africa” program. With funding from Defra and Kew, he is presently studying the Sierra Leone indigenous coffee known as Coffea stenophylla (Rubiaceae) under a proposed Sierra Leone Tropical Important Plant Areas (TIPAs) program in two range areas; Kasewe Forest Reserve and Kambui Hills Forest Reserve.

Following the outbreak of the Ebola virus disease in Sierra Leone, Prof. Lebbie pivoted Njala University and spearheaded a collaborative agreement with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to conduct ecological surveillance and molecular diagnosis of viral hemorrhagic fever viruses in bats and other small mammals as its Principal Investigator since 2016. This collaboration resulted in the co-discovery of the Angola type Marburg virus in the Egyptian fruit bat for the first time, and definitively established the Rousettus bat as the host for the Marburg virus. He is actively involved in building capacity in the university for surveillance of hemorrhagic fever viruses, and has a team of young and talented researchers that are active in the field and competent in molecular laboratory diagnostics. He is also collaborating with the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) at Galveston (USA) for the study of mosquito-borne viruses, as well as in its D43 Training program. Three of his laboratory staff have participated in advanced training at UTMB, another two participated in training at CDC, plus two additional staff received training at the Pasteur Institute in Senegal on mosquito taxonomic and surveillance work. He has also collaborated with Milwaukee School of Engineering, and Lawrence University in Wisconsin (USA) on capacity building initiatives at Njala University.

Lebbie, A. R. and R. P. Guries. 1995. Ethnobotanical value and the conservation of sacred groves of the Kpaa Mende of Sierra Leone. Economic Botany 49(3):297-308

Lebbie, A. R. and M. S. Freudenberger. 1996. Sacred Groves in Africa: Forest Patches in Transition”. In Forest Patches in Tropical Landscapes, edited by J. Schelhas and R. Greenberg. Chapter 15, Pp.300-324. Island Press, Washington, DC.

Lebbie, A. R. and R. P. Guries. 2008. “The Role of Sacred Groves in Biodiversity
Conservation in Sierra Leone”. In African Sacred Groves: Ecological Dynamics and Social Change, edited by M. J. Sheridan and C. Nyamweru. Chapter 3. Pp. 42-61. Ohio University Press.

Cheek M, Challen G, Lebbie A, Banks H, Barberá P, Riina R. 2016. Discovering Karima
(Euphorbiaceae), a New Crotonoid Genus from West Tropical Africa Long Hidden within Croton. PLoS ONE 11(4): e0152110. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0152110.

Lebbie, A, Kouame F and Kouassi E. 2017. Specialization in the use of ethnomedicinal
plants in Rivercess County,Liberia. Journal of Medicinal Plants Research 11(14):264-274.

Lebbie A, R. Wadsworth, J. Saidu and C. Bangura C. 2017. Predictors of Hypertension
in a Population of Undergraduate Students in Sierra Leone. International Journal of Hypertension. Article ID 8196362, 10 pages. https://doi.org/10.1155/2017/8196362.

Cheek M, and Lebbie A. 2018. Lebbiea (Podostemaceae-Podostemoideae), a new,
nearly extinct genus with foliose tepals, in Sierra Leone. PLoS ONE 13(10):e0203603. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.02013603

Ammam B.R., B.H. Bird, I.A. Bakarr, …… A. Lebbie. 2020. Isolation of Angola-like
Marburg virus from Egyptian rousette bats from West Africa. Nature Communications 11(1): 1-9.

Johnny, J., Lebbie, A., and Wadsworth, R. 2022. Ethnobotanical survey of medicinal
plants utilized by forest edge communities in southern Sierra Leone. Journal of Medicinal Plants Research 16(1):11-25.

Sesay, J. V., Lebbie, A., Wadsworth, R., Nuwamanya, E., Bado, S., and Norman, P. E.
2023. Genetic structure and diversity study of cassava (Manihot esculenta) germplasm for African Cassava Mosaic Disease and fresh root yield. Open Journal of Genetics 13(01):23-47.