Fourth Meeting of the DS-I Africa Consortium
16 - 22 November 2024

Mr Christopher Kintu - Travel Awardee

BCX-Africa: Utilizing data science to evaluate the applicability of blood cell traits polygenic risk scores for disease prediction in Africa (PhD trainee)

I'm a Bioinformatics PhD student at Makerere university in my final year, with a background in Biochemistry and Immunology.

My main research focus is in investigating the predictive utility of polygenic risk scores in under-represented populations ,like African populations. My trait of interest for the PhD currently is Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD) where I developed a PRS for eGFR in African Americans to predict CKD in continental Africans. This research was conducted under the African Computational Genomics Group.

Part of my research also involves applying Mendelian randomization methods to determine causal effects between traits. For example, I determined the causal effects between lipid traits and estimated glomerular filtration rate as a measure of kidney function. This was published in a manuscript in eBioMedicine. I'm also currently examining the causal association between blood traits and kidney function in Africans. My other interests are in machine learning models since most of the methods I apply in my analyses employ these models in the background.

I'm also widely interested in genome-wide association studies, phenome-wide association studies, Mendelian randomization studies and statistical genetics.