APHREA-DST Visit

This past October, we welcomed our colleagues and collaborators from the Advancing Public Health Research in Eastern Africa through Data Science Training (APHREA-DST) Project, to the in-person portion of the Second Annual Faculty Scholar Training Program. The APHREA-DST Project is a partnership between Columbia University (USA), Addis Ababa University (Ethiopia), and University of Nairobi (Kenya) to accelerate public health research and impact, by establishing new multi-tiered training programs in public health data science in Eastern Africa. APHREA-DST is one several training programs funded under the NIH Data Science Initiative for Africa (DS-I) program that has funded more than 35 hubs across the African continent, in partnership with several US based universities.  

The week-long training helped to connect early and mid-career Faculty Scholars from Addis Ababa University and University of Nairobi with Faculty mentors from our Columbia University, helping them develop research, coursework, and their own university programs.  

From the Center for Community-Engaged Health Informatics and Data Science (CCHIDS) at the Columbia School of Nursing to the International Center for AIDS Care and Treatment Programs (ICAP), our colleagues were given the opportunity to engage with and learn from the various research initiatives across the Mailman School of Public Health. In between introductions and activities, the Faculty Scholars took time to engage in collaborative research, leveraging their own ongoing work to do hands-on training with new data science techniques.  

A roundtable discussion capped off the experience, creating space for future planning, ideation, and collaboration of the APHREA-DST project.