The Africa Research Excellence Fund (Africa)

The Africa Research Excellence Fund 

The Africa Research Excellence Fund (AREF) is an African founded and led charity, supporting African scientists who are committed to improving prognoses in Africa. AREF supports emerging scientists, helping them to develop the skills, networks and capabilities they will need to plan, manage and implement world-class medical research and to attract the levels of competitive international funding and collaborations they will need to ensure their continued professional growth and impact.

In 2020/2021, funding from the Eurofins Foundation supported Dr Adesola Olalekan’s fellowship, which focuses on multi-drug-resistant pathogens. In Nigeria, her home country, morbidity and mortality due to Antimicrobial Resistant (AMR) infections are on the rise and constitute a serious public health crisis. However, there is a shortage of surveillance studies to inform national antimicrobial surveillance systems, largely because the country lacks the expertise and resources required to undertake whole-genome sequencing and conduct computer modelling of the resulting datasets.

Dr Olalekan pursues her work at the University of Leeds, UK, where she is learning functional analysis and interpretation of disease data, using computational tools. The wider benefit is the transfer of knowledge and skills to her employing organisation and to the scientific community in Nigeria. Adesola is committed to joining the Africa Alliance on AMR, teaching courses to students on pathogen genomics and bioinformatics and strengthening her home university’s AMR group through teaching computational analysis.

This project contributes to the following United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal