I was born and raised in Cameroon. With a scholarship offered by Cameroon, I completed my undergraduate training at the University of Yaoundé, where I received a B.Sc. in 1979 and a M.Sc. in biochemistry in 1980. I applied biochemical techniques while working at the Institut Pasteur of Yaoundé in 1981 and 1982. With a scholarship granted by the Kingdom of Belgium, I subsequently went to Belgium for postgraduate studies at the University of Louvain, where I obtained a M.Phil. in 1985 in Applied Biology and Environment and a PhD in 1989 on the identification and characterization of developmentally regulated oncogenes in embryo cells. My annex thesis demonstrated that microsatellite probes could be used in cell cloning for molecular characterization of single cells.