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Prof Isabella Oyier

Head Of Bioscience


Biography

Isabella is the Head of Bioscience in the programme. She is also an Associate Professor at the Nuffield Department of Medicine and a Reuben College Global Research Fellow, University of Oxford. She is currently a Calestous Juma Leadership Fellow, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 2021, to Integrate malaria molecular epidemiology into routine surveillance in Kenya. A project that partners with the Division of National Malaria Programme (DNMP) to implement malaria molecular surveillance activities. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she led the COVID-19 testing and co-ordinated the regional genomic surveillance in collaboration with Africa CDC and WHO-Afro. With recent funding from Wellcome, she leads a project to continue work nationally and regionally on COVID-19; to establish a platform for immunological surveillance to identify and report, in near real-time, on the immune escape potential of newly emergent SARS-CoV-2 variants. She previously was awarded a Wellcome Intermediate Fellowship and was a Visiting Lecturer at the Centre for Biotechnology and Bioinformatics (CEBIB), University of Nairobi, between 2011 and 2016. She has been and is a member of several technical working groups on genomic surveillance, including the DNMP Operational Research committee of experts and Africa CDC genomic surveillance advisory groups.