I am currently an Assistant Professor in Bioinformatics at the MRC/UVRI & LSHTM Uganda Research Unit under a Roche grant supporting the Uganda Medical Informatics Center (UMIC). In this role, I coordinate and support bioinformatics activities across the Unit—providing high-level expertise in human and viral genomic data analysis and co-leading bioinformatics training.

I took my first steps into bioinformatics as an undergraduate student in Biomedical Sciences (2014-2017) at Makerere University, Kampala. This was complemented by the 2017 iteration of the Introduction to Bioinformatics Training run by H3ABioNet, a pan-African Bioinformatics Network for the the Human, Heredity and Health in Africa (H3Africa) Consortium. From 2017-2018, I was a bioinformatics and computational biology intern under the Makerere University/UVRI Infection and Immunity Training Programme (MUII-Plus), an initiative supported by the DELTAS Africa initiative. This training started as a 3-month internship (June-August 2017) at the UVRI Core Laboratories under the supervision of Dr Jonathan Kayondo and then developed into a 1-year Strategic Internship, developing skills such as Python programming, high performance computing, and metagenomics analysis. By mid-2018, I had begun contributing to bioinformatics workflow development and training on the UVRI campus with support from H3ABioNet.

In 2019, I joined the Sydney Brenner Institute for Molecular Bioscience (SBIMB), University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), Johannesburg, South Africa as an MSc student supported by a grant from GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) to the Wits Health Consortium. My research, supervised by Prof Scott Hazelhurst and Prof Zane Lombard, focused on characterisation of CYP2D6 pharmacogenetic variation across African populations, and the benchmarking of tools for accurately calling pharmacogene star alleles (haplotypes and structural variants). Following the upgrade of this research to a PhD, I developed a novel tool (StellarPGx) to facilitate scalable and accurate star allele calling for CYP2D6 and other key/hypervariable pharmacogenes from high coverage whole genome sequence (WGS) data. I used StellarPGx and other complementary tools to characterise CYP2D6, CYP2B6, and CYP2A6 genetic variation across African populations, leveraging high coverage genomes generated by H3Africa projects and the 1000 Genomes Project. I also led the validation of novel CYP2D6, CYP2B6, and CYP2A6 star alleles using targeted long-read resequencing. During my postgraduate period, I received research awards such as the Southern African Society of Human Genetics (SASHG) Young Investigator Award (2021), and the Wits University Faculty of Health Sciences Most Prestigious PhD Award (2022). 

I was the first recipient of the prestigious 4-year postdoctoral fellowship at the SBIMB, supported by the Sydney Brenner Charitable Trust (SBCT) and the University of Edinburgh. The SBCT was established in the honour of Dr Sydney Brenner (1927-2019), a Nobel Laureate from South Africa who is widely regarded as a founding scientist of Molecular Biology. The SBCT fellowship aims to contribute to the advancement of biomedical research on the African continent, by providing support to advance the careers of young researchers of African nationality in health-related research. The SBCT fellowship afforded me the time to further develop a track record in pharmacogenomics research (PMID: 39829327, PMID: 37929326, PMID: 36576133) and to work with collaborators across Wits/South Africa, Africa, and across the globe (PMID: 39030343, PMID: 39051767). Furthermore, the fellowship included opportunities to spend 1-3 months annually at the University of Edinburgh to receive additional training, skills development, mentorship, networking opportunities, and develop collaborations (e.g. PMID: 41298791, PMID: 40512603). 

From 2024-2025, I also completed a 1-year trainee fellowship (2024-2025) in pharmacogenomics and computational genomics under the Trans-Omics for Precision Medicine (TOPMed) program supported by the NIH National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI). As a TOPMed trainee, I enhanced my skillset in cloud-based genomics analysis through adapting StellarPGx for pharmacogenomics analysis of NHLBI/TOPMed genomic data on the BioData Catalyst platform powered by Seven Bridges.