Conference 2019 – Bio Informatics and Emerging Technologies

The Uganda Infectious Disease Institute (IDI) and Colleges of Health Science (CHS) and Computing (CoCIS) in partnership with the US Government’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the Office of Cyber infrastructure and Computational Biology (NIH/NIAID/ OCICB) are committed to nurturing genomics and bioinformatics research capacity in Africa. As such, through various initiatives including that of the H3Africa grant mechanism, these entities are partnering to sponsor the creation of a fully-functional African Centre of Excellence (ACE) program in bioinformatics in Uganda. The ACE was launched on March 21st 2019, at the IDI McKinnell Knowledge Centre in Makerere University. The ACE will be coordinated by IDI, CHS and CoCIS. It has a dedicated high-performance computing cluster, a tele learning centre, a collaborative room with collaborative spaces and a Virtual Reality room for the latest 3-D pedagogical approaches.

The sessions covered under this theme were a prelude to this launch and focused on Human genomics/genetic diversity and its role in chronic non-communicable diseases and Human and Pathogen genomics/genetics.