Dr Diana Kisakye Kabbale

Dr. Kisakye holds a Bachelor's in Medicine and Surgery from Makerere University and an MSc in Genomic Medicine from St George's University and King's College London. She has over eight years of clinical experience and works as a bioinformatician at the Infectious Disease Institute and in the Nielsen Lab (Virginia Tech). She also volunteers as a clinician in the Unit of Genetics at Makerere University.

She is interested in translating genomics and data science into improved patient care and policy. Her previous research investigated how Mycobacterium tuberculosis evades host defence mechanisms, specifically how it might interfere with host transcriptional networks by analyzing transcriptomic data from in vitro human immune cells infected with M. tuberculosis. Her current research focuses on Cryptococcus neoformans, WHO's #1 priority fungal pathogen, which causes Cryptococcal Meningitis, a fatal brain infection in immunocompromised people. She uses bioinformatics and other analytical approaches (statistical and Machine Learning) to probe both the pathogen and the host to understand why some patients with Cryptococcal Meningitis develop poor outcomes. Through this work, she hopes to discover and drive personalized treatment strategies for patients with Cryptococcal Meningitis. At a national level, she is also involved in the surveillance of Plasmodium falciparum parasites that escape detection by widely used Rapid Diagnostic Tests due to deletions in the Plasmodium falciparum hrp2 and hrp3 genes.