Third Meeting of the DS-I Africa Consortium
3 November - 9 November 2023

Ms Jenicca Poongavanan - Participant

Role of Data Streams In Informing Infection Dynamics in Africa- INFORM Africa (PhD Student)

I am a Ph.D candidate in Computer Science at the university of Stellenbosch in South Africa, affiliated with the Centre for Epidemic Response and Innovation (CERI). I am also part of the INFORM Africa hub, a consortium that focuses on the effective use of big data to address pressing health issues of SARS-CoV-2 and HIV pandemics, as well as building capacity to better prepare for future pandemics, and the CLIMADE-Africa consortium, focused on the assessment and response to climate-sensitive arboviruses in Africa. I earned a degree in Mathematical Statistics at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in South Africa in 2016. The application of Statistics to natural systems really captivated me and I thus pursued a master's degree in Ecological Statistics at the university of Cape town where I tutored honours level statistics classes at the same time. I also completed a second master's degree in Interdisciplinary Ecology at the University of Florida in the United States. Why a second master's degree? Understanding data has always been intriguing to me, however, I stumbled across how much data is out there but yet so little is shared among our peers. During my master's thesis, I investigated to what extent we are able to reproduce published research articles and how we can work on a more open platform for data share-ability and reproducibility. Going forward, I would like to further those reproducible practices amongst scientist for a more open science community.