EpiWise’s Jessie Abbate had the honor of being invited to Kinshasa this week as part of the inaugural festivities for the University of Kinshasa’s Institute for One Health in Africa (INOHA) Master’s program in Applied Modeling for Global Health.
By honor of invitation from the esteemed Professor Jean-Jacques Muyembe on the campus of the Institut National de Recherche Biomedical, she gave a lecture to the incoming class sharing the importance of translation from disease models to decision support tools that is at the heart of Project EpiWise.
The trip to Kinshasa also gave Dr Abbate the opportunity to meet with EpiWise project partners from across institutions and government health agencies in DRC, particularly the Institut National de Sante Publique, where we were greeted with enthusiastic support and interest.
We forged some new collaborations, met up with colleagues from WHO and INRB, and spoke with students working on the most pressing topics of interest in their communities and context.
We also took the opportunity to cross the river to present our project to Pr Francine Ntoumi, director of the Congolese Foundation for Medical Research (FCRM) in Brazzaville. Pr Ntoumi is a world leader in the fight against malaria and other climate-sensitive infectious diseases. She leads several lively research groups that put information into action in the field.
Big thanks to Pr Dav Ebengo for organizing the whole week and being a world-class host!
