Profile

I am a budding scientist living in Kilifi, Kenya. My favorite food is pilau. I love driving and visiting serene places to cool off from science. During my free time I enjoy playing and watching football, chilling with my friends and listening to podcasts.

My work involves using computational tools to answer biological questions. I mainly work on respiratory and enteric viruses trying to understand how they evolve, infect and spread causing infectious diseases. An example is during the COVID-19 pandemic, I worked to identify individuals infected with COVID-19, characterising the strains that infected them, understanding how the virus spreads across the country and wrote policy briefs to the Ministry of Health to inform public health policy.

My typical day starts at 8 am juggling between running lab experiments, analyzing genomic, epidemiological, and clinical data in R and python and doing programming in bash where I build and refine analysis scripts. In the course of day, I have group specific or departmental meeting to attend and also meet with students who I supervise. I end my day at around 5:30 pm by going for a run or playing football with friends.

If I win the KES 50,000, I will us the money to organize interactive workshops across three junior secondary schools within Kilifi County where I will introduce students to the practical applications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in modern science. There is a lot of effort in inspiring high school going students to pursue careers in Science, Technology, engineering and Mathematics (STEM) and one of the areas where substantial advancement has been made is in the field of AI. The goal will be to demystify AI, introduce the students to free and opens source AI tools that they can use for various tasks, perform interactive simple tasks in biology using AI and work with the teachers in the biology and computer science departments to create a simple AI guidebook for continuity of the initiative long-term.  The money will go towards covering transport costs to and from the schools, printing educational material like flyers and posters and getting internet bundles for demonstrations. Another option would be to invite the students to KEMRI- Wellcome Trust Research Programme and provide transport and lunch support and run the sessions at the programme. In the end, I hope to inspire students through the engagements to understand and utilize AI in science, boost their curiosity in AI and STEM and nurture the next generation of “I am a Scientist get me Out of here”.