People
Faculty
Emmanuel Olamijuwon
Emmanuel Olamijuwon is a CHERISH Research Fellow at the University of Southampton, UK. His research interest lies at the intersection of technology, sexuality, & population health in low-and-middle-income countries. His recent projects (SouthScieX, FaMeLynk, SHYad.NET) combine data from traditional data sources (such as the DHS), with digital traces (Facebook and Twitter) and Online surveys to illuminate the complexity of a number of social and health issues such as knowledge inequality, suicide ideation, as well as sexual and reproductive health.
Fidelia Dake
Fidelia Dake is a Senior Lecturer at the Regional Institute for Population Studies (RIPS), University of Ghana. Her research focuses broadly on population health and international development. Her research interests include nutrition and physical activity, obesity and non-communicable diseases, socio-environmental determinants of health, urban health, health statistics, health-financing and population ageing. She is also interested in using methods in computational social science to study health and lifestyle behaviours including dietary practices, physical activity and travel behaviours.
Evans Osabuohien
Evans Osabuohien is a Professor of Economics and the Head of the Department of Economics & Development Studies at Covenant University, Nigeria. He a fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation(AvH) and Swedish Institute. He coordinates the Research Linkage Programme between Witten/Herdecke University, Germany and Covenant University, Nigeria with funding from AvH. His primary research interest centres around development, institutional economics, and agricultural/land economics.
Obindah Gershon
Obindah Gershon is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Economics and Development Studies at Covenant University. He is also the Chair at the Centre for Economic Policy and Development Research (CEPDeR), Covenant University and a visiting professor at Eduardo Mondlane University, Mozambique, St. Jerome University, Cameroon and Emerald Energy Institute, University of Port Harcourt, Nigeria. His research interest covers energy, sustainable development, climate change and the environment.
Speakers
Vissého Adjiwanou
Vissého Adjiwanou is a professor of demography and quantitative and computational methods in the Department of Sociology at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), and adjunct professor at the Department of Demography (Université de Montréal). He directs the lab on quantitative and computational social science, aiming to use computational approaches and methods in population studies in sub-Saharan Africa. His primary research focuses on population issues in sub-Saharan Africa and Canada, including family dynamics, gender inequality and reproductive health, and integration of immigrants from SSA in Canada. His recent research focuses on understanding the African’s government response to Covid-19 in sub-Saharan Africa through the channel of Facebook data. He led the first SICSS in Africa in 2018 and 2019.
Diego Alburez-Gutierrez
Diego Alburez-Gutierrez (PhD in Demography, London School of Economics 2018) is Head of the Research Group “Kinship Inequalities” at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Germany. He specialises in inter-generational demography. His work integrates non-traditional data (e.g., from digital or computational sources) with established demographic sources (e.g. censuses and population registers).
Lateef Amusa
Lateef Amusa is a Statistician and Data Scientist with a PhD in Applied Statistics from the University of Kwazulu-Natal, South Africa. He is a faculty member in the Department of Statistics, University of Ilorin, and currently a post-doctoral fellow in the Centre for Applied Data Science at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. Lateef is a tech enthusiast and is mainly interested in big data analytics and machine learning. He attended the second SICSS held at the Unversity of Capetown in 2019.
Laurie Baker
Laurie is a disease ecologist and marine biologist by training. She earned her BSc and MSc in marine biology at the University of St. Andrews and Dalhousie University (MSc) respectively, and her doctorate in epidemiology at the University of Glasgow. Laurie is a certified RStudio Instructor with a keen interest in programming, data science, and the use of novel data sources in research. The core of her research focuses on spatial and temporal patterns in human and biological systems including disease spread, animal movement, and fisheries management.
Édith Darin
Édith Darin has been mapping and estimating population for the WorldPop research group at the University of Southampton since 2018. She developed tailored advanced statistical models to tackle outdated or incomplete population count mainly in sub-Saharan Africa. She led collaborations with the Burkina Faso and the Mali Statistics offices to fill the gaps in their census (2020 and 2022) caused by security challenges. To ensure open knowledge transfer she developed a one-week course on Bayesian population model for census support in close partnership with UNFPA and the Brazilian Statistics Office. Her work has been featured in several peer-reviewed publications (Remote Sensing, Nature Communications, Gates Open Research) and relayed by different institutions (Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, GRID3, French Institute for Demography, UNFPA). Her background is in Statistics (Paris Graduate School of Economics, Statistics, and Finance), social sciences (École Normale Supérieure) and geographic systems (University of Southampton).
Robert Yao Djogbenou
Robert Djogbenou is a PhD candidate in Demography at the Université de Montréal. He has a Post Graduate Program in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning at the University of Texas at Austin. His research uses computational approaches to study immigrants’ socio-cultural integration in Canada. His other interests include reproductive health and family dynamics in sub-Saharan Africa. He is affiliated with the Lab on quantitative and computational social science at the Université du Québec à Montréal.
Andrea Gilardi
Andrea Gilardi is a Research Fellow in Statistics at the University of Milano - Bicocca, Department of Economics, Management and Statistics. He works mainly on spatial and spatio-temporal models for data on street networks (e.g. car crashes and ambulance interventions). He is a passionate R user and author of two R packages that ease the management of spatial data in R: osmextract and sfnetworks.
Stephane Helleringer
Stéphane Helleringer is a demographer with interests in a) the development of new methods to measure demographic trends in countries with limited data, and b) measuring the impact of epidemics on population health and mortality. He has conducted several trials of innovative approaches to collecting demographic data (e.g., computer vision). He has also worked extensively on the impact of HIV/AIDS, Polio, and Ebola in several African countries. Helleringer is currently the principal investigator of a multi-country study on adolescent and adult mortality in Malawi, Uganda, Guinea-Bissau, and Bangladesh. He recently initiated a panel study of behavioral change during the COVID-19 pandemic in Malawi. He is a member of the expert group advising the World Health Organization (WHO) on COVID-19 mortality assessment.
Biandri Joubert
Biandri is a researcher in the field of international trade law and has recently submitted her PhD thesis for marking. She will defend her thesis later in the year. She started her research with a purely legal (doctrinal) research background before transitioning to a mixed methodology PhD research project which included a content analysis using R programming. The difficulty in finding resources that were relatable to a legal academic background prompted the design of her Open Life Sciences (OLS) project. She is currently based in Johannesburg where she conducts both academic research and research/consulting in the private sector. When not writing/researching, she is most likely fly fishing or talking about fly fishing.
Sena Okuboyejo
Sena Okuboyejo holds a PhD in Management Information System; and is currently with the Nova Scotia Health Authority, Canada, on the One Person One Record (OPOR) project. Her research interest lies in the intersection of technology, population health, and health behaviour modification. She works with textual and unstructured data to understand perceptions and attitudes towards health issues.
Olufunke Oladipupo
Olufunke Oyejoke Oladipupo is a professor of Computer Science (Artificial intelligence and Data Management), Covenant University, Ota, Ogun State with reputable high-impact publications and 18 years university teaching experience. She holds B.Sc in Computer Science from the University of Ilorin, Kwara State, M.Sc Computer Science from Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Covenant University, Ota, Nigeria. Her research interests include Data mining, Machine Learning, Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM), intelligent systems and Perceptual Computing in Education and Medical domains. She is professionally certified in IBM Predictive Analytic Modelling. She is a member of the Computer Professional Registration Council of Nigeria. She is also a member of research bodies such as Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM), and SMCS TC on Soft Computing. She is a member of the Editorial Board of a number of local and international journals. She is happily married with Children.
Victor Osamor
Victor C. Osamor is a Full Professor of Computer Science, former HOD, Computer and Information Sciences and past Coordinator/ Director of Covenant University Center for Information Technology (CU CIT). His research interests revolve around bioinformatics, and artificial intelligence, among others. He holds a PhD in Computer Science and a Post-Doctoral fellowship as Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Warsaw. Among other several successful awards, he is currently the Applied Research Coordinator for World bank-6 million dollar funded Covenant Applied Information and Communication - African Center of Excellence (CApIC-ACE) research grant project. He is also a co-author of Fundamentals of Computer Applications, a textbook widely used by University students.
Suhem Parack
Suhem Parack is a Staff Developer Advocate at Twitter. He helps students and academic researchers with their research using the Twitter API. Before joining Twitter, he was a Solutions Architect at Amazon.
Tim Riffe
Tim Riffe is a demographer, with a research focus in data, formal methods, mortality, population health, data visualization, and open science. He is currently an Ikerbasque Research Fellow and Visiting Professor at the University of the Basque Country. In 2020 he founded the COVerAGE Database, a global demographic database of COVID-19 cases, deaths, tests, and vaccinations, which has underpinned efforts to monitor the pandemic at the WHO, UN-DESA, UNICEF, and in the global health literature. He also serve on the WHO / UN-DESA Technical Advisory Group for COVID-19 Excess Mortality, where his primary contribution aims to characterize age patterns of COVID-19 direct mortality and all-cause excess mortality for 2020, based on combining various global datasets. He regularly teach short workshops on R programming, demography, and data visualization in programs such as BSSD, EDSD, PHDS, and others.
Lebogang Ramafoko
Lebogang is currently the Executive Director of Oxfam South Africa. Lebogang is an outspoken feminist thinker and strategist, a sought-after speaker, facilitator, and trainer who is passionate about social justice particularly for young women and girls. Lebogang combines her own life experience as a black woman who grew up in Apartheid South Africa, thrust into activism at an early age and the skills she acquired through her training to speak out against injustice wherever she goes. She is one of the prominent media commentators and advocates on various social issues facing women in South Africa.
Maëlle Salmon
Maëlle Salmon is a R(esearch) Software Engineer, part-time with rOpenSci where she, among other things, maintains the guide rOpenSci Packages: Development, Maintenance, and Peer Review . She also created the R-hub blog and co-wrote the online book HTTP testing in R with Scott Chamberlain. She regularly contracts for various organizations, including research institutions, for developing or strengthening R packages. Maëlle has a PhD in Statistics. She lives in Nancy, France. Maëlle on GitHub, Twitter, Website
Yudhvir Seetharam
Yudhvir Seetharam is currently an Associate Professor in the School of Economics and Finance; and the Head of Analytics, Insights and Research for FNB Business. He holds a Ph.D from the University of the Witwatersrand in the field of behavioural finance and is extensively involved in both academia and practice, as evidenced by regular media engagements, memberships in societies and awards.
Yudhvir's area of focus is on the application of empirical (analytical) techniques to finance (broadly defined as both investments and corporate finance), with an emphasis on incorporating investor psychology/biases into these techniques. Interest in this field is relatively scarce in South Africa, but there has been growth over the past decade. While this area may seem broad, the underlying theme is on applying inter-disciplinary approaches in solving traditional problems in the financial field. As such, there are neighbouring applications in the field of Financial Technology (such as “big data” and “data science”) and in risk management.
He has published extensively in local and international journals, such as the Investment Analysts Journal, International Journal of Emerging Markets, Eurasian Business Review, inter alia. Yudhvir is an Editorial Board member of the Journal of Business Analytics; an Editor for Cogent Economics and Finance and Springer Nature: Business and Economics. He is also the Managing Editor for the South African Journal of Economic and Management Sciences.
Anelda van der Walt
Anelda has a background in Bioinformatics but transitioned into transdisciplinary work over the last few years. In 2015 she founded a South African-based consultancy, Talarify, to support digital and computational capacity and community development within research settings in Africa. Her work focuses on open science, open educational resources, reproducible research, and communities of practice.
Teaching Assistants
Oluwatosin Deborah Edafe
Oluwatosin Deborah Edafe is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Economics and Development Studies at Covenant University, Nigeria. She is also a Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy and Development Research (CEPDeR), Covenant University. Her primary research interest involves Development Economics, Land and Agricultural Economics. She uses mixed methods analysis (quantitative and qualitative techniques) to study the gendered impact of land investments on household livelihood and food security. She has over a decade of work experience with the Ondo State Ministry of Education, supervising education activities.
Theresa Okediya
Theresa Okediya is a Technical Tutor in different I.T institutions. She is a Masters degree holder in computer Science and her research areas include, data science and machine learning. She enjoys using data science skills to solve problem in different sectors but most especially the health sector. She is a passionate teacher. Her driving objective as a technical Tutor is that 'Technology is the new universal language and every one both young and old should learn how to speak this language'
Participants
Precious Adebola
Precious holds a Master of Public Health degree and is currently a Master's student in Bioinformatics at Covenant University. Her research interest lies at the nexus of technology and computation with biological and health data for improved health outcomes. Her current research focuses on the development of computational tools for the analysis of genomic data.
Julius Ajayi
Julius Ajayi is a PhD candidate in the Department of Transport Management at the Ladoke Akintola University of Technology, Nigeria. He is also a Research Associate at the Centre for Economic Policy and Development Research (CEPDeR), Nigeria. His research interests include Transport Equity, Policy Development and Sustainability. His Doctoral thesis focuses on the disparities in access to public transportation among population groups in a sub-Sahara African urban centre. Between 2016 and 2019, Julius led data-driven education advocacy across three geopolitical zones in Nigeria.
Joshua Akinyemi
Joshua Akinyemi is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Epidemiology and Medical Statistics, College of Medicine, University of Ibadan, Nigeria. His expertise spans statistical demography and applied biostatistics with additional interests in the burgeoning discipline of data science and allied topics such as statistical and machine learning. He has extensive experience in advanced statistical modelling and multi-country analysis of complex nationally-representative household surveys.
Christiana Alex-Ojei
Christiana Alex-Ojei is a social demographer and statistician with interests in adolescent, maternal, child and family health. She is also interested in mixed methods and interdisciplinary research.
Joseph David
Joseph David is a Masters student in Economics at the Umaru Musa Yar’adua University, Katsina. His primary research interests include poverty and inequality, public finance, corruption, development economics and money laundering. Joseph’s current research focuses on the response of the level of poverty to different thresholds of debt stocks and debt burden in several African countries.
Michael Ehinmowo
Michael Ehinmowo is a master's student in the department of psychology at the University of Ibadan. His current research interest is at the nexus of mental health, collective behaviour, bioethics, and social policy. He is interested in employing emerging tools of computation in science.
Victoria Okafor
Victoria Okafor is a PhD candidate at Covenant University. Her research interest includes financial/monetary economics and development economics. She is also a research associate at the Centre for Economic Policy and Development Research. Her research involves understanding the dynamics of income distribution toward the sustainable development of Africa.
Oluwaseyi Olopade
Oluwaseyi Olopade is an early career researcher and a recent graduate of Financial Economics at the University of Johannesburg. Oluwaseyi’s current research aims to address the impact of out-of-pocket health expenditure and the state of well-being in Nigerian households. She holds an Honours Bachelor’s degree in Econometrics from the University of Johannesburg, and an undergraduate degree from Ajayi Crowther University.
Samuel Olumide
Samuel Olumide is a master student and research assistant at the Department of Agricultural Economics at Ladoke Akintola University of Technology. Samuel is joining Department of Agricultural Economics at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in the Fall of 2022 to continue his masters studies.
Marvellous Ngundu
Marvellous Ngundu is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in economics at the University of KwaZulu Natal (UKZN) in South Africa, a Research Assistant at the UKZN's Macroeconomics Research Unit (MRU), and a Research Fellow at Covenant University's Center for Economic Policy and Development Research (CEPDeR) in Nigeria. His primary research interests include China-Africa economic engagement, and international and development economics.
Mary Muyonga
Mary Muyonga is a PhD candidate at the Population Institute at the Department of Geography, Population and Environmental Studies at the University of Nairobi in Kenya. Prior to her doctoral studies, Mary obtained a Master's degree from the same Institute. Her research interests are migration and urbanisation and their interplay with development, and more recently, the use of alternative, emergent research methods in social science research.
Augustine Ogbaji Otobi
Augustine Ogbaji Otobi is an avid researcher who loves to use computational tools to investigate the WHY, WHEN, WHERE and HOW of events, patterns and systems represented by numbers. He bagged his first degree in Computer Science from the University of Calabar, Nigeria. He is a Master's Student, and his research area is Data Science/Machine Learning. His research spans climate-related issues, fraud and risk prediction in insurance, expert systems and distributed databases. He is looking forward to research collaborations to solve real-world problems and make human existence on earth hitch-free.
Ridwan Shittu
Ridwan Shittu is a Master’s student in Medical Demography at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria and the founder of IgnitePeak Advanced Professional Consult. He is interested in exploring how big data and computational demographic techniques can be used to advance the study of behavioural and health inequality. His thesis work explores the pattern and rural-urban differential of maternal health care practice and childhood respiratory infection symptoms. Ridwan holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Demography and Social Statistics from Federal University Oye-Ekiti, Nigeria.
Damian Kalu Ude
Ude Damian Kalu is a lecturer in the Department of Economics, Michael Okpara University of Agriculture, Umudike, Nigeria. He holds a PhD from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. He has a research interest in Econometrics, Finance and Public Sector Economics. He is a member of the Econometric Society and also a Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy and Development Research (CEPDeR), Covenant University.