Walter Odur

Walter Odur is a Research Assistant and Trainee at ACE, contributing to the DSI-Africa-funded project titled Genome-wide Characterization of Complex Variants and Their Phenotypic Effects in African Populations. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Biomedical Laboratory Technology from Makerere University and is a member of the Cancer Genomics Working Group, where he is involved in developing a workflow for somatic mutation detection in cancer genomes. Walter’s primary research interest centers on the role of DNA repeats in various cancer types, specifically investigating how these highly mutating genetic elements contribute to cancer development and progression in African populations and how they might be leveraged to improve treatment outcomes. To support bioinformatics capacity building in Africa, he has served as a teaching assistant in DSI-Africa’s First Human Genome Repeat Expansion Analysis Virtual Workshop and as a teaching staff for H3ABioNet’s Introduction to Bioinformatics course (IBT2024).