Martha Luka
Supervisors
Prof. James Nokes
Prof. James Nokes
Email : JNokes@kemri-wellcome.org James Nokes is Professor of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at the School of Life Sciences, University of Warwick. Since 2001 he has been based full time at the Wellcome Trust Major Overseas Programme, Kilifi coastal Kenya. James trained in Zoology (BSc) followed by a PhD in virus epidemiology. His principle interests are the transmission dynamics and control of human viral pathogens, including respiratory syncytial virus and rotavirus. The focus of his WT Senior Investigator Award is the integration of epidemiological and genomic data to infer transmission pathways at different scales of interest from the household to countrywide. His research group is inter-disciplinary using molecular, phylogenetic, immunological, mathematical, statistical and field approaches to address key questions relating to respiratory and enteric virus persistence, transmission, and intervention.
Dr. Charles Agoti
Dr Charles Agoti is a Mid Career Research Fellow (MCRF) under the IDeAL Programme. Prior receiving the fellowship Charles was working as Postdoctoral Bioinformacian with the Virus Epidemiology and Control (VEC) group within the KEMRI-Wellcome Trust Kilifi Programme. For more than 10 years,
Charles’ primary focus was generating and analyzing respiratory virus genomes to improve understanding on the underlying transmission and evolutionary patterns that allow persistence of these pathogens in host populations. Charles has made significant contributions into the understanding of the nature and variant composition of local seasonal respiratory syncytial virus (RSV, a leading cause of childhood pneumonia) epidemics and the role of genetic variation in RSV repeat infections.
The IDeAL MCRF supports Charles to extend this transmission genomics work to medically important enteric viruses. Specifically, Charles will be investigating viral diarrhea genomics pre and post-rotavirus vaccination in Kenya to understand virus source, transmission patterns and vaccine impact.
I hold a BSc in Medical Laboratory Science and Technology from the University of Nairobi and a Post Graduate Diploma (PGD) in Health Research Methods from Pwani University. I have worked as a clinical laboratory technologist at the Nairobi Hospital and interned at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention-Kenya. As an IDeAL PGD fellow, I worked on the molecular characterization of human rhinovirus among school-going children. This experience equipped me with numerous molecular and computational skills, and as a result, I won an EANBiT scholarship to pursue an MSc in Bioinformatics at Pwani University. For my master’s research project, I aim to elucidate the transmission pathways of human rhinovirus within and across different scales using whole-genome sequence data. The successful completion of this project will inform public health policies on the management of outbreaks of human rhinovirus, the most commonly isolated viral respiratory agent. My supervisors are Prof. James Nokes, Dr Charles Agoti, and Dr Alii Kiti from Pwani University.
I am interested in virology, molecular biology, pathogen genomics and data visualization.
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