Overview

MUII supports both directly funded fellows, and honorary fellows (who are funded from other sources, but benefit from MUII resources and peer support). Fellows are recruited at Masters, PhD, postdoctoral and research group leader level. PhD and post-doc fellows receive funding to allow travel to work with collaborators outside Uganda in “sandwich” attachments.

The past ten years have been an exciting time for MUII with the emergence and flourishing of a dynamic group of young Ugandan scientists learning how to harness cutting edge tools in basic sciences (such as immunology, molecular biology, genetics and bioinformatics) to address the health challenges of tropical Africa.  These ambitious and inspiring scientists have “graduated” from MUII-1 and from a number of other research capacity development programmes and these are now leading the MUII-plus Centre of Excellence implementation teams (Impi’s) to drive science and excellence in this field.

To date, MUII boasts of a total of 52 fellows: 3 group leaders, 15 post-docs, 20 PhD fellows, 16 Masters fellows.  As well, MUII has supported over 1000 internships and has shared science with about 5000 school students at Open Days. Collaborations have also emerged between Makerere Colleges, the Infectious Diseases Institute (IDI) and the Uganda Virus Research Institute (UVRI) and young scientists are working together to secure research funding to address big challenges.
The fellowship programme is complemented by courses and workshops to provide specific skills, and to support professional development, that are run throughout the year.