Dear Centre Leaders,
Greetings from the INDEPTH Secretariat. We hope you have had a good week.

We have the following items for your attention:

1. Kilifi statistician gets best poster award at ISC

Young scientist, Mark Otiende’s paper was adjudged the best poster for the Young Scientists category at the just ended ISC 2015 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

His poster was titled “Psychometric Evaluation of the Major Depression Inventory at the Kenyan Coast”.
Otiende is a statistician in the Epidemiology and Demography Department at the KEMRI-Wellcome Trust Research Program in Kilifi, Kenya. 

For the past four years he has been working with the team that operates the Kilifi Health and Demographic Surveillance system and the Kilifi Vaccine Monitoring system.

His current interests include Integrated Health Surveillance Systems, Vaccine Epidemiology, Longitudinal Data Analysis and Photography.

INDEPTH sponsored nine young scientists for a training workshop at the ISC.
They are Abere Shiferaw Alemu from Kersa HDSS, Ethiopia; Mark Otiende from Kilifi, Kenya; Irene Tampuri  Azindow, from Kintampo, Ghana; Mohammad Abubakar Siddik from Chakaria, Bangladesh; Alfred Kwesi Manyeh, Dodowa, Ghana; Noah Kasunumba, Iganga/Mayuge, Uganda; Isaiah Agorinya from Navrongo, Ghana and Ivan Kasamba from Kyamulibwa in Uganda.

Over the years, INDEPTH has been organising pre-ISC trainings for upcoming and young scientists of member HDSSs. This training is to build scientists capacity to be able to publish papers in high impact journals.

The ultimate aim of the workshop is to assist a select number of young scientists to transform their draft papers to publishable papers.
For this year’s ISC, 45 young scientists submitted their papers for the Young Scientists’ category and nine were eventually selected for the training.

The training was held on 10 November 2015, with all the nine young scientists attending. There were two facilitators - Justine Davies and Zöe Mullan both editors from top global medical journals, The Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology and The Lancet Global Health respectively as well as representatives from the INDEPTH Secretariat and some observers.

2. Prof. Martien Borgdorff is new site leader for KEMRI/CDC HDSS

Prof. Martien W. Borgdorff has been appointed the site leader for KEMRI/CDC HDSS. The position was previously held by Dr Frank Odhiambo.

Prof. Borgdorff is Director of CDC Western Kenya. He is also a professor of epidemiology at the University of Amsterdam and Editor-in-chief of the International Journal on Tuberculosis and Lung Disease.

He has more than 30 years of working experience in health and health research. He has also co-authored more than 200 publications and over 30 PhD students completed their thesis under his supervision.

Prof. Borgdorff graduated as MD in 1980 at the University of Utrecht, obtained an MSc degree (with distinction) at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in 1986, and successfully defended his PhD on the epidemiology of HIV-1 infection in Mwanza region, Tanzania in 1994 at the University of Amsterdam.

He was resident in Zimbabwe and Tanzania for over eight years, working in public health and epidemiological research.

His previous employers include the World Health Organisation, the Royal Tropical Institute, Amsterdam, the Netherlands Institute of Public Health and the Environment and the KNCV Tuberculosis Foundation.

His main interests are the epidemiology and control of infectious diseases with a special interest in tuberculosis and HIV. His tuberculosis research focused on the molecular epidemiology of tuberculosis in low and high incidence settings and on disease burden estimates and their trends.

3. Request for Applications: INDEPTH site research to improve capture of pregnancy outcomes (2016-2018)

Through a grant from the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF) via LSHTM to INDEPTH, there is funding available to support research over the next 3 years, in between 3-6 sites which have high quality HDSS data for Maternal and Newborn Health (MNH) outcomes. In addition, funding for joint meetings to facilitate the development of shared research protocols, analysis plans and dissemination of results is also available. Further ideas regarding the improvement of data accuracy and consistency, particularly in regard to neonatal cause of death attribution, social autopsy for perinatal deaths and assessment of birthweight and gestational age in HDSS, are extremely welcome.
Please see attached for the details of this call.

4. Call for DELTAS Sub-Saharan Africa Consortium for Advanced Biostatistics Training (S2 ACABT) Masters and PhD in Biostatistics fellowships for 2016 Academic Year

The Sub-Saharan African Consortium for Advanced Biostatistical Training (S2 ACABT), a consortium of twenty African and northern institutions with the University of the Witwatersrand as the lead; and KEMRI-Wellcome Trust Research Programmes, Universities of KwaZulu-Natal, Warwick and London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine as co-applicants, has secured funding from the Wellcome Trust/AESA through the Developing Excellence in Leadership, Traning and Science (DELTAS).

The funding will cover Masters and PhD programmes in Biostatistics in participating training institutions to develop and improve biostatistical skills among researchers, with an ultimate goal of creating research nodes of excellence to grow the discipline and a biostatistical network to nurture researchers with advanced skills and expertise. The consortium is, therefore, calling for full time scholarship applications for Masters and PhD degrees.

Application deadline for Masters scholarships is 15 December 2015.
Application deadline for PhD Scholarships is 31 March 2016.
Please see attached for details.