I'm a consultant researcher at the World Bank-UNHCR Joint Data Centre on Forced Displacement (JDC) as a World Bank Group Africa fellow. I'm also finalising my PhD in Computer Science at the University of Cape Town. At the JDC, I research how forced displacement affects malaria vulnerability and burden, with a particular focus on how climate shocks mediate this relationship. For my PhD, I am working on AI for explainable health risk prediction and decision support using multimodal and heterogeneous health data. I explore the integration of symbolic AI, particularly ontologies and knowledge graphs, with machine learning and Bayesian networks within a hybrid AI architecture. My PhD research is conducted within the Artificial Intelligence Research Unit (AIRU), which hosts South Africa's Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research (CAIR) network. I'm supervised by Prof. Deshen Moodley, and I'm a L'Oréal-UNESCO For Women In Science Young Talents Awardee, recipient of the Generation Google Scholarship, and alumni of the Hasso Plattner Institute and Mawazo fellowship programs.

Prior to this, I graduated with Distinction from the University of Manchester, where I earned an MSc in Advanced Computer Science with a specialization in AI. I did my dissertation in deep learning and human-robot interaction at the Cognitive Robotics Lab, supervised by Prof. Angelo Cangelosi. I was a Chevening Scholar, funded by the UK Government's Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.

I was born and raised in Nairobi, Kenya. I spent the first few years of my career working as a software engineer, and also had a brief stint in technology consulting. I enjoy speaking, presenting, and writing about technology, as well as mentorship and outreach in the field. I am currently mentoring Computer Science undergraduate students as part of the KamiLimu mentorship program. I have been a contributing technical writer at Scotch.io and RealPython.com, where I have written programming tutorials on Python and its web frameworks. I have also been active with Django Girls, and have volunteered as a coach for workshops in Nairobi, Mombasa, and Manchester.

On a weekend, you can probably find me hiking one of Cape Town's beautiful trails (Platteklip Gorge, Chapman's Peak, and Little Lion's Head are firm favourites!), trying to get to a sub-30 minute parkrun, or road tripping across the Western Cape and beyond rediscovering what adventure looks like in Nairobi and surrounds after nearly four years in Cape Town... but I am equally happy curled up on the couch with a good audiobook or podcast.

You can reach me by email at [my_first_name] . [my_last_name] @ gmail . com.