Peninah Wanjiku Wachira

Supervisors

Prof. Charles Newton

Prof. Charles Newton

Principal Investigator, KEMRI - Wellcome, Kenya & Professor of Psychiatry, University of Oxford, UK

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Charles Newton qualified from the University of Cape Town, South Africa, with postgraduate training in Paediatrics in Manchester and London, United Kingdom. As a lecturer at University of Oxford, he went to Kilifi Kenya in 1989, to help set up a unit to study severe malaria in African children. Thereafter he spent 2 years as a Post-doctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins, USA; studying mechanisms of brain damage in central nervous system infections. He completed his training in Paediatric Neurology at Great Ormond Street Hospital, UK. In 1998 he was awarded a Wellcome Trust Senior Clinical Fellowship at University College London, to return to Kilifi, to study CNS infections in children. He conducts research on CNS infections in children; epidemiological studies of epilepsy and neurological impairment; tetanus, jaundice and sepsis in neonates. He is particularly interested in behavioural comorbidity of neurological conditions in children.  In 2011 he took up a professorship in Psychiatry at the University of Oxford to conduct studies of Neurodevelopmental Disorders and Epilepsy in Africa and Autism in the United Kingdom and Lithuania

Dr. Symon Kariuki

Dr. Symon Kariuki

Postdoctoral Researcher, KEMRI - Wellcome, Kenya

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Affiliation(s):

KEMRI – Wellcome Trust, Kenya

I pursued Bachelor of science in Environmental Health (Public Health) at Moi university. I have been a volunteer at Kilifi County Referral Hospital in the Public Health department where I gained various skills in; primary health care promotion initiatives, disease surveillance and response, immunization, public health and sanitation, licensing and regulation of entities that sell food to the public among others. I have also worked in an NGO, WOFAK (Women Fighting AIDS in Kenya) Kilifi branch. In WOFAK I was tasked with supervising community health volunteers and monitoring their activities in follow up of HIV patients for treatment adherence.  Currently, I am in for the postgraduate diploma course doing a project on “Effects of Anti- Epileptic Drugs On the Outcomes of Pregnancy”. I aspire to gain new skills in conducting systematic reviews, epidemiological analysis and writing manuscripts alongside identifying an area in research which I can venture in. I also look up to networking with other researchers and learning from them.  My interest is in considerably neglected topics of public health concern and vulnerable groups, in this case epilepsy: its treatment and effects particularly on the outcomes of pregnancy. My primary project supervisor is Prof. Charles Newton and Dr. Symon Kariuki as the co-supervisor.