John Mukisa, PhD

Mukisa John, MD has a MSc, PhD in Bioinformatics and is a Research Scientist at Makerere University College of Health Sciences, Kampala, Uganda in the Department of Immunology and Molecular Biology. He has also had a part-time study coordinator role at the Uganda Case Western Reserve University Research Collaboration for the last 10 years. He has also trained at the Human Genome Sequencing Centre in Houston, Texas, USA. John is a recent PhD in bioinformatics graduate whose thesis focused on understanding the imputation performance, immunogenetic diversity and associations of Killer Cell Immunoglobulin-like receptors (KIR) on natural killer cells with HIV disease progression in pediatric populations. For his postdoctoral work, John is focusing on exploring the critical link between the gut microbiome, persistent immune activation, and illness severity among children in low and middle-income countries under the NIH- funded Global Health fellowship program with Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas, USA and the Childhood Acute Illness and Nutrition (CHAIN) Network. He employs advanced sequencing technologies and bioinformatics pipelines to interrogate shotgun metagenomics, proteomics, short-read and whole-genome sequence data from African populations. John seeks to establish a niche in immunogenetics and relationships between microbiome and infection in African settings to enable discoveries for translational science. His team recently characterized KIR diversity in African populations, which highlights increased genomic diversity in African populations. John teaches bioinformatics and mentors bioinformatics fellows. In the long term, John strives to become a global health, immunogenetics and microbiome leader.