Dr. Ritah Mutagonda (Research Fellow)

Dr. Mutagonda is a pharmacist and a lecturer for more than 7 years in the Department of Clinical Pharmacy and Pharmacology at Muhimbili University of Health and Allied Sciences (MUHAS), Tanzania. She holds a PhD in Clinical Pharmacology and a Master’s degree in Pharmacology and Therapeutics from MUHAS through the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency funding. Mutagonda’s research interests include the determination of the effectiveness and safety of the drugs used in the prevention and treatment of infectious diseases particularly malaria and HIV. She has expertise on drug metabolism and plasma drug levels studies as well as clinical trial studies. She is a mentor and a research supervisor to postgraduate and undergraduate students and has co-authored several papers in peer-reviewed journals. She participated in investigating the pattern of utilization of malaria chemoprophylaxis in sickle cell disease (SCD) patients in Dar-es-salaam, Tanzania where we showed that majority of SCD patients do not use any antimalarial drug (Ndegeulaya EJ et al, Malar J., 2019). This work highlighted the need for a search for a suitable antimalarial that can be used by SCD patients for malaria chemoprophylaxis in Tanzania. She is currently working as Malaria Chemoprophylaxis Study Lead for Sickle Pan Africa Research Consortium (SPARCO)- Tanzania.