Meet our Team

Gershim Asiki is a Research Scientist at APHRC, leading the non-communicable diseases (NCDs) research program under the Health and Systems for Health Research Unit. He holds a Ph.D. in Epidemiology from Karolinska Institute, Sweden (2016), a Master of Science in International Health from University College London (2007) and a Bachelor of Medicine and Surgery from Makerere University (2000). His research work mainly focuses on generating population-level evidence to inform NCDs prevention and control efforts and strengthening the health system response to chronic disease management.

Victoria Bronstein teaches law at the School of Law at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. She is also an advocate at Thulamela Chambers in Johannesburg. She researches media and information law particularly data protection law. She was also certified as a data protection officer (DPO) for GDPR purposes in Maastricht. Apart from this she has a research interest in South African provincial and local government. She was previously a Commissioner on the Broadcasting Complaints Commission of South Africa. She is providing specialist legal advice on the MADIVA project.

Xavier Gómes-Olivé Casas’ is a Reader (Associate Professor) and Research Manager in the MRC/Wits Agincourt Research Unit at the School of Public Health, University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. His areas of interest are chronic diseases (including communicable (HIV) and non-communicable diseases). Areas of study that he is  leading include amongst others the study of multimorbidity in older populations and the integration of chronic care in the primary health care system including the development and strengthening of information systems. Xavier will be Project Lead on Project 1 within MADIVA.

Barry Dwolatzky is an Emeritus Professor at Wits University. In July 2021 he was appointed as the Director of Innovation Strategy in the office of the Deputy Vice Chancellor: Research and Innovation. He is also Director of the Joburg Centre for Software Engineering (JCSE) at Wits. He has spent most of his academic career teaching and researching in the field of software engineering. He also has a long track record in promoting digital innovation. In 2016 he established the Wits University Tshimologong Digital Innovation Precinct in Braamfontein Johannesburg. He will bring the dimension of innovation and impact realisation to the MADIVA project.

Jocelyn Gayenga is the Manager for strategic development at the Sydney Brenner Institute for Molecular Bioscience (SBIMB).. She works closely with the senior scientists of the Institute to ensure effective administration and project management of various grant-funded projects. Jocelyn provides administrative support to all projects based at SBIMB and has years of invaluable experience in grant administration.

Jaya George, PhD, is currently the Chair of the Department of Chemical Pathology, National Health Laboratory Service (NHLS) at the University of Witwatersrand.  Her area of expertise is in research on non-communicable diseases (NCDs) and the interaction of infectious diseases with NCDs. Her initial work was on HIV and metabolic abnormalities. More recently she has used the NHLS database to work on the care of NCDs in South Africa. Jaya is involved in the Data Management and Analysis Core (DMAC) within MADIVA.

Kerry Glover is a project manager and communications specialist. She has been working at Wits University as a project manager for various departments for two years now, since completing her Masters in Art History (Wits). She is the Project Manager on MADIVA and helps support and manage the project as a whole across the sub-projects and sites. She comes from a background in television and communications, having worked in both corporate and agency environments.

Scott Hazelhurst is based at the SBIMB and the School of Electrical & Information Engineering at Wits. Originally a computer scientist, he has been involved in bioinformatics since 2003. His main research interests are bioinformatics and high performance computing. He is currently a collaborator on the H3A AWI-Gen project and BioNet projects, and the H3A/GSK project exploring the extent and impact of variation in the genes of pharmacogenomics relevance in African populations Scott is co-Principal Investigator of MADIVA and will be involved in Project 2, the DMAC and the TCPDC.

Karen Hofman is Research Professor and Director of the SA MRC Centre for Health Economics and Decision Science: PRICELESS at the Wits School Of Public Health where she leads policy research to evaluate interventions that provide the biggest return on investment. A Wits graduate and qualified paediatrician and geneticist, she was on faculty at Johns Hopkins and served as Policy Director at the NIH Fogarty Center. She has been a member  of ministerial committees and is a widely published. Karen will lead MADIVA work to evaluate successful interventions through an economic lens.

Samuel Iddi is a Research Scientist, Bio-Statistician, and Data Scientist. He holds a Ph.D. in Biomedical Sciences (Specialization in Biostatistics) from the University of Leuven, Belgium, a Master of Statistics (Biostatistics) from the Universiteit Hasselt, Belgium, and a BSc Mathematics degree from Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Ghana. He has expertise in the development and deployment of predictive dashboards, generating dynamic reports, tables, and graphics, and analyzing large and complex datasets. His research works have influenced and informed statistical and public health practices.   Samuel plays both technical and project management roles on MADIVA at the APHRC site.

Damazo is a Statistician and Epidemiologist  with over 17 years of statistical practice, consultancy and research experience in multidisciplinary settings. . His research direction is aimed at improving health and socio-economic status among communities affected by poverty, disease and/or educational inequalities. His research interests are in the domains of Public health/epidemiological practices/services with respect to HIV/AIDS and/or correlated infections; Pregnancy; Adolescents; Health information management; as well as modeling of Data from Educational Sciences. He is involved across several Projects and Cores within MADIVA as a member of African Population and Health Research Center (APHRC).

Kathleen Kahn is Principal Scientist at the MRC/Wits Rural Public Health and Health Transitions Research Unit (Agincourt). She is a Personal Professor in the School of Public Health, University of the Witwatersrand and leads the Interdisciplinary PhD programme in Public and Population Health. She partners with communities, public-sector departments, and collaborating investigators to undertake excellent, ethical, and community-sensitive research and elevates rural priorities to policy and decision-makers. Since inception of the Agincourt health and socio-demographic surveillance system in 1992, she has led work on mortality and cause of death measurement, using verbal autopsy to track transitions over a period of dramatic socio-political change and the HIV/AIDS epidemic. 

Isaac Kisiangani works at African Population and Health Research Center (APHRC)  in the health and system for health unit. Isaac has a Masters of Science degree in Public Health as well as a Bachelor of Science degree in Medical Laboratory Science. He previously worked as Assistant Research Officer at the Centre for Clinical Research (CCR) in KEMRI. His main areas of interest are in non-communicable diseases and healthcare systems. He is currently working on the H3A AWI-Gen project Kenya site. Isaac is co-PI of MADIVA and will be involved in Project 2, at the Kenya site.

Mike Klipin is based at the Wits Health Consortium and Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of the Witwatersrand. A practicing General Surgeon, he has been involved in biomedical informatics since 2012.  His main interests include the implementation of technology in the healthcare space, the gap between Information Technology and clinical practice and the development and support of instruments to enable data capture for research and patient care. He currently manages the Faculty REDCap and Electronic Discharge Summary teams and co-supervises undergraduate and postgraduate students in a variety of clinical and biomedical informatics arenas.  Mike is involved in Project 1 as well as the teaching and training components.

Daniel is an experienced and detail-oriented data scientist with several years of experience across several industries. He is highly skilled in machine learning, data visualization, and creative thinking with strong background in computer programming languages (C/C++, Java/C#,Python). He has a special interest in developing predictive models for driving the discovery of knowledge from massive compute over large datasets and High performance computing (HPC) solutions/systems & Network solutions. Daniel is based at Agincourt, Mpumalanga.

Linda Maoyi is an experienced data analytics professional with a demonstrated history of working in various industries solving a wide range of data extraction, manipulation, analysis and reporting problems. His research interests are in studying the interactions between climate and health. His role at SAPRIN consists of developing and maintaining the SAPRIN cloud infrastructure, data repository, production of longitudinal harmonised datasets and oversee the adoption of common data quality assurance measures and methods. He is part of the DMAC.

Daniel works at APHRC as a data systems developer with over a decade of experience in IT doing different data related roles. He’s been engaged in data systems development and data management. He is an active machine learning researcher also building his capacity in data visualization. He has a MSc in Distributed Computing Systems from the University of Nairobi and a BSc degree in Computer Science from Egerton University. Daniel is passionate about data science and plans to pursue a PhD is Machine Learning and/or Artificial Intelligence. He does data management, analysis and data visualization for MADIVA.

Leah is an all rounded monitoring and evaluation professional, passionate about implementing practical and affordable monitoring and evaluation management strategies. She has vast experience in managing projects globally, and in capacity strengthening organizations in monitoring and evaluation, formulation and implementation. She also has experience in programme development, administration, management and leadership; post-graduate training and capacity strengthening; and fundraising and grant management within the African and European region. Within the MADIVA project, Leah will be assisting with the development of M&E frameworks and tracking of indicators for the legal and ethical handling of data.

Patrick Owili is a Program Coordinator in the Research and Related Capacity Strengthening (RRCS) Division at APHRC. He holds two PhD degrees from Taipei, Taiwan—PhD in Public Health (Epidemiology & Biostatistics) and PhD in Environmental Science and Technology (Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences). He has served as a graduate program coordinator in academia and conducted several multicounty research on maternal, newborn and child health. He is an international award winner for his quality research work – the Reizenstein Award. Patrick will be the Project Lead on Training, Capacity Development and Pilot Core (TCDPC) within MADIVA.

Sumir Panji is part of Prof. Nicky Mulder’s group within the Computational Biology Division at the University of Cape Town as the Bioinformatics Program Manager of the H3Africa Pan-African Bioinformatics Network – H3ABioNet and will be transitioning as the Project Manager for the eLwazi Open Data Science Platform (ODSP) for the DS-I Africa program. His domains of interests include genome science, data analysis workflows, genomics data management, data standards and governance, computational infrastructure development, and is passionate about developing bioinformatics and data science capacity within the African continent. The eLwazi ODSP will provide infrastructure, data standards support and training for the DS-I Africa funded projects such as the MADIVA Research Hub.

Helen Robertson is based at the School of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at the University of the Witwatersrand. She trained in philosophy in Johannesburg and in London, and currently teaches the applied ethics of data science. She has research interests in contemporary epistemology and the epistemology and ethics of artificial intelligence. Within the MADIVA project, Helen will be assisting with the development of hub policies for the legal and ethical handling of data.

Skyler Speakman is a research scientist and manager at IBM Research Africa in Nairobi, Kenya.  Skyler’s research areas are in anomalous pattern detection applied to Trustworthy AI and have applications in bias, fairness, robustness, uncertainty quantification and causality.    Skyler and team will be bringing anomalous pattern detection techniques to Project 2 with the goal of efficiently identifying sub-populations that are experiencing higher-than-expected mortality events.  Skyler received his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in 2014. Skyler is a Co-Investigator on MADIVA member of Project 2.

Girmaw is an AI Research Scientist working at IBM Research Africa, mostly on  detecting and characterizing bias in data and machine learning models. Prior to that, He worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Oxford where he primarily developed deep learning techniques to assist disease diagnosis.  He completed his PhD under the Erasmus Mundus Double Doctorate Program in Interactive and Cognitive Environments. He is also currently serving in program committees for top-tier AI journals and conferences. Girmaw will be a part of the IBM team that provides AI expertise to the MADIVA’s Project 2.

‘Siphiwe Thwala is a Research Scientist (Post-doc) within the NLP Team at IBM Research Africa, South African Lab. His research background is in computational astrophysics, with a focus on using unsupervised learning to detect signals of the plasma produced by non-thermal diffuse emission, in extended radio sources. His work at IBM includes: semantic based sentiment analysis on twitter data; interactive data visualisation of twitter data; and semantic based insights extraction and knowledge modelling on biomedical text. Siphiwe will work on Project 1 on Natural Language Processing techniques for analysing Verbal Autopsy reports.