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Stanford Teams with Researchers To Use IT Against HIV and TB in Africa

Published: April 25, 2005

Stanford investigators have joined forces with South African research institutions to create a new program that will provide international training in biomedical informatics to future African leaders in health research at University of Western Cape, University of Cape Town and the National Institutes of Communicable Diseases.

Building on existing successes in working with Stanford, researchers at the University of Western Cape and Stanford have developed a broad international program. They have won an internationally competitive grant from the Fogarty International Center that provides support for graduate African scientists to pursue cutting-edge training in areas such as HIV informatics, TB drug discovery and bioinformatics. The program joins the expertise of HIV biologists, epidemiologists and bioinformaticians at Stanford, University of Western Cape, the University of Cape Town and the National Institutes of Communicable Diseases, and will deliver a cadre of ‘future African scientific leaders’ in biomedical informatics. Research programs include HIV databasing, pharmacogenomics and development of new languages for describing medical discoveries. Approximately $800,000 of funding for the program comes from the Fogarty International Center and the National Human Genome Research Institute through the U.S. National Institutes of Health over the next three years. The program is described at http://www.smi.stanford.edu/academics/ssa/index.htm.

”We are very excited to partner with our colleagues in Capetown to help train South African scientists in the use of information science to fight major threats to health,” says Dr. Russ Altman, the Director of the Stanford Biomedical Informatics (BMI) program. The program focuses on training in five areas: core informatics, computer science, probability & statistics, biology & physiology and ethical/legal/social implications of technology. “Although the BMI program has had an active distance learning program, with material delivered over the web, this program goes far beyond that in establishing personal contacts between folks at Stanford and in Capetown.” says Dr. Betty Cheng, an Associate Director of the program, and chief organizer of this collaborative effort.

“I am so excited to be the first student enrolled in the global biomedical informatics program” says Faranahz Ketwaroo, UWC masters student in bioinformatics. “I have always dreamed of working on HIV research, I never realized I would be able to be trained by some of the world’s top biomedical researchers by enrolling at the University of the Western Cape”