H3Africa Spotlights

Study Coordinator; TrypanoGEN+ project with its Secratariat at Makerere University and has sites at Uganda Virus Research Institute, in Malawi, DRC, Ivory Coast, Cameroon and Guinea. The study aims at identifying the genetic determinants of two neglected Tropical diseases; Human African Trypanosomiasis and Schistosomiasis.

Barbara has a Bachelor of Science degree in Biochemistry/Chemistry and Master of Science in Molecular biology, both from Makerere University, Uganda and a Doctorate in Science from the University of Bern, Switzerland in 2009. Barbara started off her Research Career in 2002 as a Research Assistant and rose to the rank of Research Officer I in 2009 soon after her PhD. Barbara has a vast experience in laboratory work especially Molecular Biology, little experience in ELISA, Flow cytometry and Multiplex Ligation-dependent Probe Amplification Assay (MLPA). She also has experience in field-related activities of Neglected Tropical Diseases and project. Barbara has interest in Functional genomics and systems biology.

From January 2012-February 2016, Barbara worked as a Post-doctoral Research Scientist/Assistant coordinator of the Makerere University- Uganda Virus Research Institute (UVRI) Research Training programme in Infection and Immunity (MUII) at UVRI. As a Coordinator she gained skills in coordinating activities which have been of great help since she became the project Manager of the TrypanoGEN project from April 2016- December 2018 and now is the Project manager of TrypanoGEN+ project. During these years I have gained a lot of skills in Research management and improved project coordination skills.

Some of our H3Africa Fellows were part of the Graduation ceremonies that took place at the University of the Witwatersrand in July 2022.

Congratulations to Blessing Rotondwa Sitabule who graduated with an MSc in Human Genetics. He was supervised by Dr Houcemeddine Othman and Prof Scott Hazelhurst. His research was entitled “Structural Bioinformatics Analysis of CYP2D6 pharmacogenetic variation relevant to sub-Saharan African populations”. The research was based at the Sydney Brenner Institute for Molecular Bioscience (SBIMB) and it was nested within the Wits-HAfrica/GSK ADME project, with Prof Scott Hazelhurst as the PI of the main project.

Blessing is now a Ph.D. student at the University of the Witwatersrand and his current project will be focused on assessing the impact of genetic variants on proteins involved in antimalaria and anti-TB drug response.