SHEDS — Uganda's She-Data Science Fellowship Builds a Pipeline of Women AI & Bioinformatics Researchers

SHEDS (She-Data Science) is a fellowship run by the African Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Data-Intensive Sciences (ACE), based at Makerere University's Infectious Diseases Institute in Kampala, in partnership with the University of California San Francisco's Institute for Global Health Sciences (UCSF IGHS). Launched in 2024 and funded through 2027, it exists to correct the severe underrepresentation of women in Uganda's data-science and bioinformatics workforce.
Fellows receive full tuition and living-expense coverage at Master's and PhD level, are paired with faculty mentors in their research area, and work in thematic groups on antimicrobial resistance, malaria and cancer. As of mid-2026, UCSF IGHS reports 46 fellows have completed or are currently enrolled; a September 2025 launch event reported by Ugandan outlets (PC Tech Magazine, citing programme leadership) put the cohort at 2 PhD and 5 MSc fully funded fellows plus a further round of interns, alongside the earlier intern cohort — consistent with a growing, rolling intake rather than a single fixed class.
Fellows have already produced applied research results, including identification of a cervical-cancer biomarker and a breast-cancer protein with vaccine potential, and some have trained at UCSF's Proctor Foundation. The programme sits inside the World Bank-backed Africa Centers of Excellence network, whose Makerere node has trained over 100 graduate students since 2019, giving SHEDS a plausible path to scale beyond its current single-institution pilot.

Read the full analysis: https://globalhealthsciences.ucsf.edu/she-data-science-empowering-women-scientists-in-uganda/