Dr. Nelson Kibinge

Email : NKibinge@kemri-wellcome.org

Affiliation(s):

IDeAL, KEMRI – Wellcome Trust, Kenya 

Nelson Kibinge is a postdoctoral researcher in the virus epidemiology and control (VEC) laboratory at KEMRI-Wellcome Trust since April 2016. He holds a BSc (Biology) degree from the University of Nairobi and an MSc and PhD (Computational Biology) from the Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST), Japan. Although originally a biologist, he has recently focused on bioinformatics research involving development of computational tools for sequence analysis, phylogenetics and transcriptomics. His current research project focuses on designing optimum sampling strategies for RSV surveillance. He also has a significant interest in spatial epidemiology and computational ecology.

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. George Githinji

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.