Professor Geoffrey Kwenda is currently an Associate Professor of Medical Microbiology at the University of Zambia. He received his Bachelor of Honours in Science degree at the University of Bradford in the United Kingdom in 1992, MSc in Molecular Biology from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium in 1996, and PhD in Molecular Medical Microbiology from the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa in 2010. During his PhD, he worked on the “Molecular characterisation and immunological analysis of clinical and environmental isolates of Mycobacterium kansasii from South African gold mines”.
After completing his PhD, he worked as a lecturer in Medical Microbiology at the University of Zambia in Zambia, his employer before starting my PhD studies. He has been involved in teaching and mentoring both undergraduate and postgraduate students in Medical Microbiology, Molecular Biology, Immunology, Research Methodology, Epidemiology, and Laboratory Management. In 2012, he accepted the position of Head of the Department of Biomedical Sciences. While in that position, he was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2016, and Associate Professor of Medical Microbiology in 2021. In 2020, he was appointed Assistant Dean for Research, a position he currently hold.
Prof Kwenda is a former Fogarty Fellow at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in the United States, (2002-2003) where he was involved in studying the transmission of Kaposi’ Sarcoma-associated Human Herpesvirus (KSHV) in a Zambian population. This ultimately led to my participation in the Malignancies Training and Research International Program (AMTRIP), whose overall goal is to train Zambia fellows in viral and cancer genomics and bioinformatics where he is involved in mentoring postgraduate students on this collaborative project between the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the University of Zambia. He is also part of the faculty mentoring team for the UNZA-University of Vanderbilt Training Partnership (UVP) for the HIV- Nutrition-Metabolic Research initiative at University of Zambia, which is a response to the need for strengthening the University of Zambia PhD programme and the culture of mentorship at the University. This programme contributes to improving the capacity of research laboratories at University of Zambia and its University Teaching Hospital through comprehensive 21st-century investigative tools such as whole-genome sequencing, RNA transcriptomics, and bioinformatics. Because of his postgraduate mentoring skills, he is also part of the management at University of Zambia’s Africa Centre of Excellence for Infectious Diseases of Humans and Animals (ACEIDHA), which supports the training of postgraduate students in One Health Infectious Diseases. From March 2016 to March 2018, he also involved in mentoring residents on the CDC’s Field Epidemiology Training Program (FETP) in Zambia on Scientific Communication and Mentorship Programme, whose overall aim was to develop a cadre of in-country scientific communication experts.
His research interests are primarily focused on infectious diseases, using evolutionary genomics, molecular taxonomy, field ecology, bioinformatics, and experimentation to investigate clinical and environmental factors that drive infectious diseases. Most of my work focuses on the genomic epidemiology of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in enterobacteria, respiratory pathogens, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), and Cryptococcus. His ultimate research goal focuses on understanding the natural reservoir of infection and comparing it to what we already know about infectious agents, which will help us understand the mechanisms behind disease, inform prevention and treatment strategies, and thereby reduce the burden of disease. He hope to achieve this by applying genomics and bioinformatics to understand these diseases
