Kenneth Ekoru

PhD Student

Alumni

This person is a member of Sanger Institute Alumni.

Kenneth is a PhD student at the University of Cambridge. His research focuses on maximising the utility of data from multiple surveys to identify environmental and genetic determinants of non-communicable diseases in African populations.

I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Public Health and Primary Care, University of Cambridge, and visiting scientist with the Sandhu Group, Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. My PhD supervisor is Dr Manj Sandhu. My research focuses on methods of aggregating data from multiple surveys with differing clustering structures. In particular, I am interested in maximising the utility of data from multiple surveys in identifying environmental and genetic determinants of selected non-communicable diseases in African populations. I am closely involved with the Human Heredity & Health in Africa (H3Africa) Initiative (http://h3africa.org/) and am leading the coordination of the H3Africa Diabetes study which is the largest multi-country study of the epidemiology of Type 2 Diabetes in Africa to-date. I have developed the analysis plan for this study and will be leading the analysis. I am also conducting pooled analyses of individual participant data from across Africa to clarify the relationship between HIV and cardiometabolic risk and to assess the use of anthropometric indices in determining risk for cardiometabolic disease.

I previously worked at the Medical Research Council/Uganda Virus Research Institute (MRC/UVRI) Research Unit, where, over a period of four years, I worked on a number of studies undertaking statistical analysis of a range of data including longitudinal HIV epidemiological data and population based health surveys. During this time I also spent time as a visiting scholar at the South African Medical Research Council Biostatistics Unit in Pretoria, South Africa, funded by the HIV Research Trust where I worked on developing multi-state models to analyse HIV treatment outcomes. Before starting my PhD studies, I was a visiting fellow at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and Department of Public Health and Primary Care at the University of Cambridge.