Cambridge-Africa

Corinna Alberg on her time in Cambridge-Africa

Corinna TO USE

 

When Tabitha Mwangi, the Cambridge-Africa manager, asked me to sum up my experiences with Cambridge-Africa over the last five years in a short blog, this seemed like quite a challenge. Today is my last day in post and maybe with a bit more distance I will have crystallised my thoughts better but here goes. The highlight of my time with the programme has been in partnering with the two wonderful DELTAS funded programmes MUII-plus and THRiVE-2. My role has been to support these programmes’ activities in Cambridge and this has been a great strength of my post - that I am working on African led programmes addressing African health priorities supported by secretariats in Africa. The secretariats know the African institutions well and so can offer the best guidance to the programmes’ fellows undertaking PhDs, post docs and other funded research in East Africa.

 


 

Cambridge-Africa team with Thrive and Mui Fellows

 

The Cambridge component is to add support, where this is needed, by enabling the MUII-plus and THRiVE-2 fellows to come to Cambridge University for research support. The vast majority of the research takes place in Africa but the expertise of mentors from the University of Cambridge and the facilities in Cambridge can add value to the research and the development of the fellows. Working closely with the fellows to enhance their research experience has been enjoyable and fulfilling, especially when the mentorship partnership has flourished and opened up new opportunities to the fellows as their research careers develop.

 

The programmes hold annual AGMs, which allows the consortium partners to have face to face meetings. THRiVE is a collaboration involving seven Universities and research institutes across East Africa and MUII works across Uganda, bringing together the two leading research institutions in Uganda, Makerere University and the Uganda Virus Research Institute. Pre-pandemic, we were already experienced Zoomers and were aware of the benefits but also the drawbacks of Zoom meetings without in person interaction. Fellows have supervisors in their home Universities and research institutes as well as their northern partner institution mentors; the AGMs are an opportunity for the fellows to present their research progress and have that progress carefully reviewed and where necessary for further support and guidance to be offered. Many of the Cambridge mentors have attended the AGMs. As well as being an enjoyable experience, this has been a great opportunity to learn more about the programmes, to offer support and guidance to their mentees in their home setting and to further understand the opportunities and constraints these settings offer. One of the Cambridge mentors, Dr Robin Gore came to a THRiVE AGM and wrote a blog about his experience.

 

So these have been some of the highlights and ones that I thought would be enjoyable aspects of the role. Now to the unexpected ‘joys’. I can sum up the most surprising example for me in one word - immunology. I was a complete immunology novice when I started at Cambridge-Africa, my background having been largely in public health and then focusing on genomics but immunology had never featured. I was asked to organise live video-conferenced seminars presented by Cambridge academics to support a Masters course at Makerere University on Immunology and Clinical Microbiology. This was quite a challenge when I could not tell the difference between a B and a T cell. But I gradually got sucked in and discovered the many fascinations of immunology to the extent that my lockdown project was undertaking online courses in immunology until there were no further courses to take on the platform.

 

I am sad to be leaving the lovely colleagues I have worked with both in Cambridge-Africa and in East Africa. Both programmes are currently concluding their no-cost extensions. They submitted excellent reapplications for ongoing research capacity development programmes with an increased number of partners in African countries with less successful research programmes and were in the small group of successful programmes deemed fundable. The dire UK overseas development funding landscape has drastically reduced the funds available for the parent DELTAS programme and so MUII and THRiVE. I hope that both MUII and THRiVE can continue their excellent work. They have huge expertise gained over the past 10 years in supporting African research capacity and it will be a major loss if this expertise is dissipated. I will be moving to a new role in the Department of Medicine at the University of Cambridge as a Project Manager for the THECA programme – a real world clinical trial of a typhoid conjugate vaccine in Africa. So my focus on global health and also immunology will be a key part of my new post and I hope to stay in contact Cambridge-Africa.

 By Corinna Alberg