New NIH awards to Ambroise Wonkam; and 5-year renewal for Nicola Mulder and team's H3ABioNet grant

Two awards from the NIH have been awarded to Professor Ambroise Wonkam, medical geneticist based in the Division of Human Genetics and Member of the IDM.

The first, an NIH 1 U01 Award, is for the project entitled: Hearing Impairment Genetics Studies in Africa (HI-GENES Africa) (PI Ambroise Wonkam) which will aim to investigate the genetic etiology of hearing impairment in Africa, with research focused in South Africa, Cameroon, Ghana and Mali. His second successful project application is entitled: Individual Findings in Genetic Research in Africa (IFGeneRA), a Multiple PI Collaborative Centre Award for which Wonkam is PI/Director, together with Jantina De Vries (Senior Researcher in Bioethics in the Department of Medicine, UCT). They will aim to explore incidental findings in genetic research in Africa, with research conducted in South Africa, Cameroon and Botswana.

Professor Nicola Mulder, head of Division of Computational Biology and also a Member of the IDM, has established and led the H3ABioNet (the Pan African Bioinformatics Network, http://h3abionet.org ) under the auspices of the Human Heredity and Health in Africa (H3Africa) programme. Funded by the NIH Common Fund Award for its first 5 years, their grant has just been renewed for another 5 years.

This renewal attests to the great success of the bioinformatics network and to Professor Mulder's leadership. It comprises 32 Bioinformatics research groups distributed amongst 15 African countries and 2 partner Institutions based in the USA. They support the H3Africa researchers and their projects while developing Bioinformatics capacity within Africa.