Speakers

Dynamic manager with more than 10 years (about 18 years) proven expertise in medicines regulatory field at South African Health Product Regulatory Authority excelling in clinical evaluations, operations management, compliance management and team leadership. Streamlined workflows, enhancing efficiency while fostering strong relationships across departments. Results-driven management professional with proven ability to lead teams to success. Strong focus on team collaboration, operational efficiency, and achieving measurable outcomes. Adept at strategic planning, process improvement, and fostering culture of accountability and excellence. Known for adaptability and consistently meeting changing organizational needs.

Eliford Kitabi is a pharmacometrician in the Division of Pharmacometrics, Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Silver Spring, USA. He is currently the Office of Clinical Pharmacology (OCP) Team Lead (TL) in cardiovascular safety reviews. He has Bachelor of Pharmacy from University of Dar Es Salaam in Tanzania, PhD in Clinical Pharmacology from Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm-Sweden, and completed post-doctoral research from the University of Maryland Baltimore, USA. He has more than 10 years of experience in clinical pharmacology research and teaching. His research goals are to optimize drug therapy and drug development through innovative mathematical modeling and simulations.

Aida Kawuma is a scientist at PumasAI specializing in pharmacometrics analyses across a diverse range of drugs, from small molecules to biologics. She trained as a pharmacist at Makerere University and holds a Master’s degree in Pharmacology as well as a PhD in Pharmacometrics from the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Aida is a member of the MILK Centre modelling group at the Infectious Diseases Institute, Makerere University, and the Uganda Chapter of Pharmacometrics Africa. She lives in Kampala, Uganda, with her husband and three sons.

Bill founded Human Predictions after 8 years working inside large pharmaceutical companies and has over 20 years of experience in mathematical modeling. Prior to starting Human Predictions, Bill was a Director of Clinical Pharmacology at Pfizer combining the science of drug development, the art of clinical trial execution, and the mathematics bringing those together efficiently. At Pfizer, Bill designed clinical development plans, designed and ran clinical studies, quantified clinical and nonclinical study results, and trained colleagues on clinical development and modeling. In this position, he developed MBMA tools and models to enhance transparency and understanding of internal development compounds, marketed therapies, and competitive research. He led the team that developed a tool to efficiently review ongoing clinical study datasets for trend reviews of both safety and efficacy. He pioneered new methods for understanding precision of clinical trials and optimization of new trial design based on prior studies.

Karen Rowland Yeo is a Senior Vice-President at Certara UK Limited’s Simcyp Division. She has over two decades of experience of applying PBPK models in both global health and drug development across most therapeutic areas and is currently focused on driving advancement of PBPK modelling in maternal and child health. Karen is the incoming Editor-in-Chief of the ASCPT journal Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics; in this role she hopes to advance the outreach of the journal to LMIC settings.

Catriona Waitt is a Professor of Clinical Pharmacology and Global Health at the University of Liverpool. She has been based in Uganda since 2015 where she leads the Maternal and Infant Lactation pharmacoKinetics (MILK) CENTRE at the Infectious Diseases Institute, Makerere University, alongside several other clinical trials around maternal health. She leads the Uganda Chapter of Pharmacometrics Africa.

Innocent Gerald Asiimwe, a pharmacist from Uganda, has worked in Uganda and Botswana before advancing his studies in the UK at the University of Liverpool, where he earned an MSc in Clinical Research, an MRes in Biomedical Sciences and Translational Medicine, and a PhD in Pharmacology. He later worked as a postdoctoral researcher in Prof Sir Munir Pirmohamed’s group on an MRC-funded project analyzing diseases, drugs, and therapeutic targets using large-scale data. He is currently a pharmacometrician at the University of Liverpool, contributing to the UNITE4TB Pharmacology work package, focusing on high-dimensional pharmacogenetic data and employing advanced AI methods, including machine learning, to improve treatments for drug-resistant TB.

Mahmoud Ali Afifi is an Associate Scientist in Pharmacometrics at Certara, where he supports model-informed drug development and regulatory submissions. He is a Clinical Pharmacist by training and holds two Master’s degrees—in Health Informatics and in Applied Statistics and Econometrics. He also completed the Pharmacometrics Africa Fellowship. Mahmoud has 4 years of experience in drug development as a pharmacometrician and over nine (9) years of experience in clinical data analytics and real-world evidence as a clinical researcher and biostatistician, supporting clinical trials and observational studies. His fellowship graduation project, conducted in collaboration with Sandoz, focused on model-based bioequivalence in biosimilars.

Linda is a biostatistician by training, specializing in early-stage tuberculosis (TB) drug development, with expertise in statistical modelling, machine learning, and pharmacometrics at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). Her current research focuses on optimizing drug discovery pipelines and treatment strategies to improve TB therapeutic outcomes. Beyond TB, she contributes to other infectious disease research across diverse areas, including malaria studies in vulnerable populations. She is passionate about integrating statistical methodologies with translational research to address critical global health challenges.

Steven E. Kern, PhD is the Executive Director of Global Health Labs, an innovation laboratory working in partnership with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. From 20013-2022, he was the Deputy Director of Quantitative Sciences at the Gates Foundation. Prior to that, he was Global Head of Pharmacology Modeling at Novartis Pharma in Basel Switzerland where he led a team focused on model-based drug development. He joined Novartis in 2010 from the University of Utah where he was Associate Professor of Pharmaceutics, Anesthesiology, and Bioengineering.