Building pan-African Bioinformatics Capacity
Rhodes University, Research Unit in Bioinformatics, RUBi
Member Node
Rhodes University, Research Unit in Bioinformatics, RUBi
Member Node
RUBi is a dynamic, fast growing and enthusiastic Research Unit, open to new ideas and challenges. It is located in the Department of Biochemistry and Microbiology. RUBi has established itself as one of the top structural bioinformatics groups in the country. But its research is not limited to structural bioinformatics only. RUBi offers a one-year Bioinformatics MSc programme - currently the only one of its kind in South Africa. Please browse our website for further information on the unit, our research, collaborators and publications.
Prof. Ozlem Tastan Bishop - Professor and Node PI
Ozlem received her BSc degree in Physics from Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey. Then she moved to the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics at the same University for her MSc degree. She obtained her PhD from Max-Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics and Free University, Berlin, Germany in 2003. She was co-founder and the first President of the student association of Max-Planck Institute in Berlin. While doing her PhD, Ozlem became interested in structural biology, and during her postdoctoral positions (Texas University, UWC and UP) she gained experience in structural bioinformatics as well as structural biology. In October 2009, Ozlem took up a senior lecturer position at Rhodes University, with the responsibility to develop postgraduate studies in bioinformatics at the University. She established Rhodes University Bioinformatics research group (RUBi) in 2010, and started one-year MSc programme in bioinformatics by coursework and research thesis in 2011. Since October 2013, RUBi is a research unit (Research Unit in Bioinformatics). Ozlem was the first president of the South African Society for Bioinformatics (SASBi) between 2012 and 2014. Ozlem's broad research interest is comparative genomics and structural bioinformatics.
BioinformaticsStructure AnalysisBiophysicsComputational Biology Computational Chemistry Drug DiscoveryHuman GeneticsInfectious Disease Molecular BiologyMolecular DynamicsMolecular ModellingPersonalized Medicine Protein Structure AnalysisProteinsRare DiseasesSequence Analysis Structure PredictionWorkflows 
Dr Bilinga Maureen Tendwa - Software Developer
Dr Tendwa Maureen Bilinga is a physician scientist with clinical, wet-laboratory and computational Biology experience. Currently, her doctorate degree undertaken at RUBI research unit in Rhodes University, focuses on Cancer pharmacogenomics in the genetic variation affecting African ancestry population. In the quest to discover personalized tailored precision medicine for cancer using machine learning.
BioinformaticsMedicineStructure AnalysisData Visualisation Data MiningDrug DiscoveryPersonalised MedicineMolecular Modelling Protein Structure AnalysisProteinsPharmacogenomicsSequence Analysis Structure Prediction
Miss. Margaret Nabatanzi - Software Developer
Margaret Nabatanzi is a PhD student in Bioinformatics at Rhodes university, South Africa. She completed a master's degree in Bioinformatics from Rhodes University, and a bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Makerere University, Uganda. Her current work involves further development of the PRIMO pipeline to model protein complexes. For her MSc. she worked on a web application that employs artificial neural networks to predict HIV drug resistance. For her PhD project, Margaret plans to continue working on improving methods for predicting drug resistance using machine learning in single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) analysis. Outside her current PhD work Margaret is interested in medical statistics, big data analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence, which together with bioinformatics she intends to pursue as part of her life-long career plan.
BioinformaticsComputer ScienceMathematicsData Management Software Engineering Machine Learning Statistics and Probability 
Mr. Victor Barozi - Software Developer
Victor Barozi is a bioinformatics PhD student at the Rhodes University, Grahams town. His masters and PhD work is focused on understanding the mechanism of drug resistance of Mycobacterium tuberculosis to first-line drugs as a result of SNPs. His favorite programming language is Python.
Bioinformatics 
Stacey Crocker - Administrative Assistant/Lab Manager
Stacey Crocker resides in Grahamstown and works at the Research Unit in Bioinformatics (RUBi) group as an Admin assistant / Lab manager.
Bioinformatics 
Mr Mokgerwa Monama - Software Developer
Mokgerwa Zacharia Monama is a Bioinformatics PhD student, under the supervision of Prof. Ӧzlem Tastan Bishop at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, Eastern Cape. His current studies are focused on finding the resistance mechanism of one of the the first-line drugs used in TB treatment. He enjoys coding and having long talks with his colleagues in RUBi (Research Unit in Bioinformatics). He is very proud to have earned a position and the chance to contribute as a Software Developer towards meeting the goals of the H3ABionet consortium.
Bioinformatics 
Chiamaka Okeke - Part-time Software Developer
Chiamaka Jessica Okeke is a doctoral candidate at Rhodes University, South Africa. Her PhD is focused on drug discovery using computational approaches. She graduated with a Master's degree in Bioinformatics from the same university in 2019. In 2016, she graduated from the University of Lagos, Nigeria with a Bsc(Hons) in Microbiology. She is a member of the American society for Microbiology (ASM) and is a certified Health, Safety and Environment (HSE) officer. In 2017, her one-year mandatory National Youth Service Corps (NYSC), a scheme established by the Nigerian government to involve Nigerian graduates in the nation building, was carried out in the department of Genetics, Genomics and Bioinformatics, National Biotechnology Development agency (NABDA), Abuja, Nigeria. Her role in the department included, lecturing industrial training (IT) students on introduction to molecular biology and biotechnology, ensuring proper functioning of the molecular diagnostic and gene cloning laboratories and its equipment, and assisting in various molecular biotechnology experiments. She is also working as a part-time software developer for H3ABioNet, Rhodes University node.
BioinformaticsMathematicsStructure AnalysisData Visualisation Data ManagementDrug DiscoveryMicrobial EcologyMicrobiology Molecular ModellingProtein Structure AnalysisStatistics and Probability ProteinsSequence AnalysisData Submission, Annotation and Curation
Dr. Olivier Sheik Amamuddy - Post-Doctoral Fellow
Olivier SHEIK AMAMUDDY is a post doctoral research fellow at the Research Unit in Bioinformatics (RUBi). His areas of interest include the application of structural bioinformatics methods for the early stages of drug discovery and the training of machine learning models mainly in the context of drug resistance. The VIM editor and the Linux command line are his friends and he is a firm believer that open-source software projects are an accelerator of original and high-impact research. He has several years of experience with the Python programing language (and many of its libraries), bash and the R scripting language, and has experience in High Performance Computing. He is an alumni from the University of Mauritius, where he obtained his Honours degree in Agricultural Biotechnology and spent several years as a technician in a biotechnology (molecular biology) laboratory. He later specialised in bioinformatics by undergoing an MSc course at Rhodes University and is currently awaiting his PhD thesis examination results. During his PhD work, he authored two main articles focused on drug resistance in HIV protease and co-authored three additional manuscripts with members of the RUBi research group. His post-doctoral research area is multi-tiered, ranging from the investigation of his novel findings in drug resistance-related HIV protease mechanistics to the exploration of proteins using data-mining, machine learning and structural bioinformatic techniques.
BioinformaticsApplied MathematicsStructure AnalysisComputational Biology Data MiningDrug DiscoveryMachine LearningMolecular Modelling Protein Structure AnalysisStructure Analysis
Mr Thulani Tshabalala - System Admin and Software Developer
A computer science honours graduate and a bioinformatics masters candidate in the Research Unit in Bioinformatics at Rhodes University
Bioinformatics 
