Dr. George Githinji

Early Career Postdoctoral Fellow

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I am an IDeAL early career postdoctoral fellow at the KEMRI-Wellcome Trust Research Programme. I utilise bioinformatics approaches to study virus evolution and transmission patterns during outbreaks. My current project investigates the role of minority variants in virus evolution and in reconstructing virus transmission chains.

I hold a bachelors degree in Biomedical Science and Technology from Egerton University and a PhD from the Open University (UK) advised by Dr Peter Bull (University of Cambridge), Prof Kevin Marsh (Oxford University) and Dr Britta Urban (University of Liverpool). My PhD thesis explored the extent of sequence and epitope diversity within a short region of the PfEMP1 molecule that is associated with characteristic expression patterns in severe and non-servere malaria cases.

Before joining the programme, I trained under Dr Patrick Duffy as a visiting student at the MoMs malaria project in Tanzania and SBRI (now Center for Infectious Disease Research) and attended bioinformatics courses at the University of Washington.