Ekwaro Obuku

Ekwaro is a PhD Candidate in Health Policy at Makerere University and McMaster University, with support from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) International Research Chair in Evidence-Informed Health Policies and Systems. Professors Nelson Sewankambo and John Lavis are his supervisors. He is studying strategies to enhance knowledge translation involving graduate students’ research projects and the impacts of these projects on decision-making in health.

Ekwaro is a founder member and coordinator of the Africa Centre for Systematic Reviews and Knowledge Translation at the College of Health Sciences, Makerere University, Uganda (www.chs.mak.ac.ug/afcen/about-us). He completed medical training at Makerere Medical School in 2003 after which he worked in disease control programmes for TB and HIV in Uganda. Ekwaro is a beneficiary of several capacity building grants. For example, in 2009 he obtained an M.Sc. in Clinical Trials from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) with scholarship support from the European and Developing Countries Clinical Trials Partnership (EDCTP). Between 2010 and 2013, he was a research scholar supported by the Fogarty International Center, National Institutes of Health, USA, under the mentorship of Professor Robert Salata of Case Western Reserve University, Ohio, and Professor Peter Mugyenyi and Dr. Cissy Kityo of the Joint Clinical Research Centre, Kampala, Uganda, where he undertook work on global health and policy. In 2012, he was awarded a scholarship by the HIV Research Trust to study economic evaluation at the LSHTM. He tutors on the subject of systematic reviews in the M.Sc. in Clinical Trials distance-learning course at the LSHTM, and has recently started a course in evidence synthesis for Masters students in clinical epidemiology and biostatistics at Makerere University, Uganda.