Building bioinformatics capacity for drug discovery in Africa with Nicola Mulder

Synopsis: This seminar will discuss the current challenges in working with big data in Africa and the capacity required. It will highlight the need for more context-relevant African data for biomedical research and innovation and then discuss some of our activities in building the capacity and addressing some of the challenges. I will present some of our work in analysing pharmacogenetic variation in African populations and the potential impact on drug discovery. Bio: Prof Mulder heads the Computational Biology Division at UCT. She is PI of the DS-I Africa eLwazi Open Data Science Platform and co-leads a Sickle Cell Disease Data Coordinating Centre and a Wellcome Trust Discovery Data Integration Platform at UCT. She led H3ABioNet, a Pan African Bioinformatics Network which developed bioinformatics capacity to enable genomic data analysis for more than a decade. Her research focuses on genetic determinants of susceptibility to disease, African genome variation, and microbial genomics and infectious diseases. Her group provides bioinformatics services and training and develops new algorithms and resources for African genomics. Prof Mulder is actively involved in capacity development in Bioinformatics and genomics. She also sits on a number of international scientific advisory boards and is currently the interim Director for the African Bioinformatics Institute.