Academician Prince Dr Philip Njemanze, MD (Hons), was born on 15 March 1962 at Owerri, Imo State, Nigeria, in the family of the Njemanze Royal Dynasty. He went to school at St Paul’s Catholic Primary School, Owerri. He is the Chairman of the International Institutes of Advanced Research and Training, Chidicon Medical Centre, Owerri, Imo State, Nigeria. His secondary education was at Government Secondary School, Owerri. In 1986, he completed his medical education at Rostov State Medical Institute, Order of Friendship, Rostov-on-Don, Russia (former USSR). From 1986 to 1992, he undertook postgraduate training and fellowships in Neurosurgery, Neurology, and Angiology at Klinikum Grosshadern, University of Munich, Germany, GUY’s Hospital London, and Bowman Gray School of Medicine, Winston Salem, North Carolina, USA. In 1992, he became an assistant research professor at Souers Stroke Institute, St Louis University Medical Center, St Louis, Missouri, USA. Among the remarkable developments of his postgraduate studies was the first in literature description of a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) phase-contrast technique for examining cerebrospinal fluid pulsatile flow in the brain.

He also described the first detailed hemodynamic study of the human brain using Fourier analysis of the flow velocity envelope in cerebral arteries. In 1991, he pioneered the brain cognitive studies of language localization using non-invasive transcranial Doppler ultrasound. He performed neurocardiology studies on brain-heart relationships and was first to describe the cerebrovascular changes during fainting spells that were not accompanied by blood pressure drop. In 1995, as one of the leading neuroscientists in the world, he was selected on a competitive basis to join with other neuroscientists from USA, Germany, France, Canada, Japan, The Netherlands, and Italy to design the experiments to study the Brain in Space.

This was a program of the National Aeronautic and Space Administration (NASA) and the United States National Institutes of Health (NIH) mandated by an Act of the United States Congress in the Decade of the Brain. He was one of the pioneers of cognitive neuroscience in space. He was first to demonstrate facial processing, motor processing, colour processing, and intelligence processing on earth and in space.

In 2005, he was first to postulate the theory of lateralization of general intelligence in the right brain in men but in the left brain in women. This has since been confirmed by other leading neuroscientists. In 2010, he postulated the Light Theory of Cerebral Asymmetry of Brain Function, which unified fundamental Quantum Physics, Neurobiology, Genetics, Evolution, Social and psycho-physiology on the basis of gender complementarity. This is the ‘Theory of Everything’. He has over 200 published works including two dozen US and UK patents. He is married to Mrs Felicia Njemanze, and they have three children: Nkem, Chidi, and Odera.