Verah Nafula Luande

Verah holds a master’s degree in molecular biology and bioinformatics from the Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (JKUAT), Nairobi, Kenya and the Swedish National Veterinary Institute (SVA), Uppsala, Sweden. The thesis was centred on the genetic distinction between the Culex mosquito bioforms; pipiens and molestus in Sweden. She has vast experience in research about vector-borne disease pathogen mainly arthropod-borne viruses and, their vectors as well as the associated ecological drivers. The experience she gained from working at the Department of Clinical Microbiology, Umeå University.

Since 2020, Verah has worked as a Project Assistant at Henrik Sjödin’s lab where she served as a data scientist responsible for data retrieval from relevant literature engines, analysis and interpretation. Specifically, she worked on data involving degradation and restoration of mangrove ecosystems that may impact mosquito populations. Besides, she has also been involved in the creation and management of a web-based database of medically important mosquito vectors globally and their respective habitats, with the aim of mapping the risk areas for the disease burden.

In 2023, Verah was selected as a Ph.D. Student at the Department of Public Health and Clinical Medicine, where she is currently researching the feasibility of ecosystem restoration to achieve nature-based solutions to battle vector-borne disease transmission in East Africa. She envisions assessing which features tend to be associated with more benign mosquito community compositions along a gradient of degradation, and how the trends are associated with disease prevalence. She will then utilize this information to identify the salient and important key environmental features and research to what extent restoring such features is effective in reducing vector-borne disease risk, and which mechanism is effectively at play in this process.