THRiVE > Teachers > THRiVE-2 PhDs > GERALD MBOOWA
GERALD MBOOWA
THRiVE-2 PhD Fellow

Mboowa is currently an Implementation Science Expert for Bioinformatics at the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) under the Africa CDC Institute of Pathogen Genomics. His interests include utilizing genomics and bioinformatics approaches to understanding diverse pathogens, resistance and susceptibility patterns to common infectious diseases in Africa. For his PhD research, he interrogated Next-generation sequencing (NGS) sequence genomic data using bioinformatics tools to investigate and identify the pathogenicity of host functional genetic variants/loci in pediatric HIV/AIDS disease progression in two sub-Saharan Africa populations. This work was funded by THRiVE-2 (Training Health Researchers into Vocational Excellence in East Africa) and CAfGEN (Collaborative African Genomics Network).

Skills

Mboowa has done postdoctoral research specifically examining HIV viral NGS data to understand its genomic diversity through the HIV Co-infections in Uganda Program funded by the Fogarty International Research Training Grant (Project #2D43TW009771-06) at the Infectious Diseases Institute, Makerere University. Currently, he is working on a project funded by the European and Developing Countries Clinical Trials Partnership (EDCTP) titled Pathogen Detection in HIV-infected Children with Non-malarial Febrile Illnesses using Metagenomic Sequencing (PHICAMS), TMA2020CDF-3159, NCT05085158.

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Biography

Previously, he has done work on understanding the Transmission Dynamics of Antimicrobial Resistance at two National Referral Hospitals in East Africa using NGS and bioinformatic. This work was funded by the Grand Challenges Africa (GCA/AMR/rnd2/058/). Additionally, Mboowa has worked as a bioinformatics scientist at the African Centre of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Data-Intensive Sciences of Makerere University. Here he supported public health institutions to utilize bioinformatics applications for infectious disease outbreak investigations and surveillance of antimicrobial resistance in a wide range of pathogens. As a bioinformatician, he is interested in training and transitioning to the use of High-throughput sequencing (HTS) technologies and bioinformatics applications in public health. Mboowa holds a bachelor of science in biomedical technology and Master of Science in Immunology and Clinical Microbiology from Makerere University. He boasts over 30 papers in peer reviewed journals.

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