Prof. Emile R. Chimusa (BSc, MSc, Ph.D.), leads the Medical Population Genetics and Genetics Epidemiology Group at the University of Cape Town (UCT). He is a mathematical population geneticist whose main focus of research is on methodologies of improvement in the analysis of large-scale genomic studies such as genome-wide association, fine-mapping studies, admixture mapping, genetics of mixed ancestry populations and analysing genome wide patterns of variation within and between species to address fundamental questions in biology, anthropology, and medicine.
He is the director of the Medical Sciences BSc Honours program in Human Genetics and Forensic Genetics in the Division of Human Genetics, Department of Pathology at the UCT Faculty of Health Sciences. This honours program attracts more than 300 international and national graduate students per year, including a number from across Africa.
He holds a C2 rating from the South African National Research Foundation (NRF), which offers me local recognition as an established researcher with a sustained recent record of productivity in my field of biomedical data sciences. He is affiliated with the Third World Academy of Sciences (TWAS) and was selected since 2018 as a Future Leader at the Science and Technology in Society forum (STS forum, Japan) in recognition of my research in the field of biomedical data sciences and bioinformatics over the past 5 years.
His research group focuses on developing and apply statistical and computational methods to understand the genetic architecture of (non-) communicable diseases. He has organized various workshops and co-organized events on Big Data, Analytics and Machine. He has developed various genomics tools for post genome-wide association (such as ancGWAS, PROXYANC), risk prediction and genomics simulations (FractalSIM), Gene Ontology semantic similarity-based functional analysis tool (A-DaGO-Fun), unified and integrative human protein-protein (PPI) networks (IHP-PING).