Professor Nicki Tiffin joined SANBI in November 2021, bringing her expertise in working with health data and the bioinformatics of human disease. She has a Ph D in molecular genomics (University of London, 2000) and a Masters in Public Health-Epidemiology (University of Cape Town, 2017). Her work includes the integration and analysis of routine health data, epidemiological, clinical and genomic data, as well as the ethics and governance of working with health data in research. Nicki leads the public health node of the H3Africa Informatics Network (H3ABioNet), co-leads the ICDA Global Equity working group, co-chairs the IHCC Policy and Systems working group and chairs the PHA4GE Ethics and Data Sharing working group. She is a fellow of the African Academy of Sciences and in 2021 was awarded a Calestous Juma Science Leadership Fellowship by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Prof Tiffin wins Calestous Juma Science Leadership Fellowship Award
In November 2021, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation launched the Calestous Juma Science Leadership Fellowship awards, providing five years of funding for fellows as well as opportunities for networking and training in non-scientific skills. These prestigious fellowships are aimed at establishing a collaborative cohort of African fellows with a wide range of expertise and research interests. For Professor Nicki Tiffin, her fellowship will fund the creation of the African Data and Biospecimen Exchange, an online platform that will facilitate ethical and equitable secondary sharing of African data and biospecimen resources. The platform will store meta-data about sample and data collections, and will enable direct sharing partnerships to be established between resource providers and resource consumers without centralisation of samples or data. It will also provide online infrastructure for drawing up and recording data-sharing, benefit-sharing and collaborative agreements.