The Office of Population Research at Princeton University is delighted to announce two new Fellows in the Visiting Scholar Program; a fellowship awarded this year to outstanding African scholars in the field of research or policy around demography and population studies.
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Dr. Oghenebrume Wariri is a Clinical Research Fellow in Vaccines and Immunity at the MRC Unit The Gambia at LSHTM. His research is primarily focused on vaccine epidemiology, specifically analyzing the performance of country-level immunization systems and investigating how broader socioeconomic and geospatial factors influence the delivery and uptake of routine childhood vaccination in West Africa.
Dr. Wariri completed his Medical Degree (MBBS) at the University of Benin (Nigeria) in 2008. In 2017, he specialised as a Paediatrician after completing his six-years residency training program, earning the Fellowship of the West African College of Physicians. In 2016, he obtained his MSc in Global Health (with distinction) as a fully-funded Chevening scholar at the University of Aberdeen, UK. Currently, he is a PhD candidate in Epidemiology at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM). His PhD is investigating the spatial pattern and drivers of untimely routine childhood vaccination uptake in The Gambia.
Dr. Wariri has a track record of obtaining competitive funding and fellowships. In 2020, he was awarded both the Wellcome Trust Global Health Clinical Research Training Fellowship at Imperial College London and the EDCTP Career Development Fellowship. In July 2023, he was awarded the five-years Fogarty Emerging Global Leader grant (K43) from the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH). The five year NIH award includes a grant of 560,000 USD for Dr. Wariri's research project, "Investigating the contribution of geographic accessibility and vaccine delivery channels to untimely measles vaccination and zero-dose prevalence in The Gambia: implications for disease outbreaks." For this NIH award, Jessica Metcalf, Associate Professor in Ecology, Evolution and Policy at Princeton University is Dr Wariri’s US-based Mentor.
Dr. Fidisoa Rasambainarivo is a veterinarian, disease ecologist and epidemiologist from Madagascar. His research is primarily focused on the transmission of diseases at the human-wildlife and domestic animal interface, with a current focus important human and animal pathogens including Toxoplasma and malaria. He also made important and significant contributions to informing and supporting the public health response to SARS-CoV-2 in Madagascar, running the national dashboard on cases and risk that was consulted nationally and by international organizations and individuals throughout the country; and publishing a series of papers investigating optimal trajectories to vaccine distribution and likely spread of the pathogen in Madagascar.
Dr. Rasambainarivo obtained a veterinary degree from the University of Antananarivo in Madagascar, an MSc in Veterinary Sciences from the Université de Montréal, and a PhD in Biology (Ecology, Evolution and Systematics) from the University of Missouri Saint Louis in Ecology. This was followed by a postdoctoral research position at Princeton University. Dr. Rasambainarivo is currently an Assistant Professor in the Biology Department at East Carolina University.
Dr. Rasambainarivo co-founded and acts as the scientific director of Mahaliana Labs, a research and training center in Madagascar that aims to build the capacity of local Malagasy scientists and promote grass-root research in Madagascar. His own research focuses on the transmission of diseases at the human-wildlife and domestic animal, and is rooted in a One Health perspective.