THRiVE fellow visited the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine in May 2014 to conduct research alongside her LSHTM supervisor, Simon Brooker.
Training Health Researchers into Vocational Excellente in East Africa (THRiVE) is a consortium of 6 universities and 3 research institutes, including LSHTM, that aim to build capacity in East Africa for health sciences research. Funding from the Wellcome Trust focuses developing infrastructure, administration and scientific capacity of African institutions. THRiVE also supports young scientists from East Africa through fellowships, including Stella Kepha from Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda.
For her PhD, Stella is investigating the impact of intensive deworming on the risk of clinical malaria and on immune responses among school children living in western Kenya. As part of her fellowship, Stella was able to visit LSHTM during February and March and spend some time with her LSHTM supervisor, GAHI's Simon Brooker, and his team. In Uganda, Stella is supervised by Fred Nuwaha from Makerere University.
Whilst at LSHTM, Stella attended courses in statistics and spatial epidemiology that will enable her to analyse the data collected during her PhD project. Sitting with the GAHI group, Stella received training in STATA and together with Birgit Nikolay processed the data that she had previously collected. The two also discussed and developed an outline for the analysis, which she will perform once she has the complete dataset.
Stella is now back in Kenya, but she recounted her time at LSHTM in THRiVE's June newsletter (pp 10-11).
In it, she says, "LSHTM has a vibrant academic and scientific environment with many seminars and talks organized on various themes every given day. It was good to hear what’s currently happening and I was inspired to give a talk in KEMRI which I have scheduled for July. I was able to interact with various PhD students from different fields which expanded my scope of knowledge and birthed new research ideas."
Visit the THRiVE website to learn more about their work.