Agnes N. Kiragga, PhD, is Head of the Data Science Program at the African Population Health Research Council (APHRC) in Nairobi, Kenya, where she leads a team working at the intersection of data science, AI, and population health across Africa.
A biostatistician by training, Agnes built her career progressively — starting in clinical research in Uganda, moving through the Medical Research Council and Makerere University, before spending fifteen years at the Infectious Diseases Institute at Makerere, where she established and led the Statistics Unit from inception. She joined APHRC in 2022 to build its Data Science Program and has since secured over $20 million in funding across more than fifteen multi-country initiatives.
As Principal Investigator, she leads Data Science Without Borders, a Wellcome Trust-funded initiative building data science capacity across health institutions in Senegal, Ethiopia, and Cameroon, and the newly launched Training Hubs for Statisticians and Epidemiologists in Eastern, Central and Western Africa (ANTENNA), an EDCTP-funded project building the next generation of epidemiologists and biostatisticians across Guinea-Bissau, Senegal, and Cameroon. She also contributes to EVAH, a $60 million global initiative co-led by APHRC and J-PAL, with funding from Wellcome, the Gates Foundation, and the Novo Nordisk Foundation, that evaluates AI-enabled clinical decision-support tools in primary care across Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia.
Agnes’s current research focus is AI evaluation — specifically how AI tools being deployed in low- and middle-income countries can be rigorously assessed against the realities of local data, infrastructure, and clinical context. She holds a PhD from Makerere University, completed her postdoctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, is a Next Einstein Fellow, Lead of the Africa OHDSI Chapter, and has authored over 150 peer-reviewed publications.
