Dr. Woldegebriel Assefa Woldegerima is an AIMS Cameroon Alumnus of the 2014 cohort. He is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the DST/NRF SARChI Chair in Mathematical Models and Methods in Biosciences and Bioengineering at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. He joined this Postdoc research after completing a PhD in August 2018 at the University of Buea with a co-supervision from the USA. As part of his PhD, he also travelled to the USA as a Pre-doctoral Research Associate for three months. He studied his PhD while working as a tutor (Teaching Assistant) in AIMS Cameroon. Recently, Dr. Assefa was selected to be part of a short-term mentorship program in the One Health Cluster UNICEF project. All these and other achievements, he says, are due to the training and skills he acquired from AIMS in 2013-2014.
Earlier in Ethiopia, Dr. Assefa graduated with a four-year bachelor’s degree in Mathematics Education from Bahir Dar University in Ethiopia and obtained sponsorship from the Ethiopian Ministry of Education (currently named Ethiopia Ministry of Science and Higher Education) to pursue his MSc in Mathematics at Addis Ababa University with specialization in Functional Analysis and Differential Equations. He heard about AIMS for the first time from his MSc thesis supervisor at Addis Ababa University. Two and a half years later, he joined AIMS Cameroon, and later graduated with thesis on Partial Differential Equation Applied in Mathematical Physics, particularly. His AIMS thesis topic was on “Existence and Uniqueness of Viscosity Solutions for Hamilton-Jacobi equation and Application to Optimal Control Theory”.
AIMS impacted Dr. Assefa to change his research career from Pure Mathematics to Applied Mathematics (Mathematical Biology and Data Sciences). The different levels of academic educational training and skills he acquired from AIMS, especially in terms of scientific computing programming, applying mathematical tools, techniques, theories to model and analyze real-world phenomena, scientific research writing, effective communication skills, etc. helped him to diversify his research skills and become more performant on the global landscape.
Currently as a Postdoctoral fellow, Dr. Assefa is working on Mathematical and Statistical Modelling and analyzing novel Transmission-Blocking Interventions (TBIs), especially on Transmission-Blocking antimalarial Drugs (TBDs) and Transmission-Blocking Vaccines (TBVs). This is in line with several scientists’ new research and innovation efforts towards global malaria control and elimination. He is also involved in other collaborative research on infectious disease modelling such as COVID-19, Cholera, TB, and Hepatitis. Prior to his current Postdoc research, Dr Assefa has worked for one year as a Lecturer at Mekelle University, Department of Mathematics in Ethiopia.
Dr. Assefa says new mathematical models have the potential to radically alter drug and vaccine development, regulatory decision-making processes and lead to more affordable, more effective drug therapy and vaccine development as well as deployment. In his future research career, Dr. Assefa is interested in performing collaborations in a wide range of mathematical sciences applications, especially in health-related problems. In the long term, he sees himself working on expanding his expertise in Data Science and Machine Learning (ML) to model and solve real-world systems, particularly in the biological phenomenon and climate.
His research publications and other background can be found at
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0336-7831
UP:https://www.up.ac.za/mathematics-and-applied-mathematics/article/2848056/dr-wa-assefa-woldegerima
His current profile #Alumnioftheweek in the Next Einstein webpage can be found here: