2024 – 2025 Harvard Global Health Institute Visiting Scholars

Dr. Wonderful Choga | Botswana A medical researcher and bioinformatician at the Botswana Harvard Health Partnership The Harvard Global Health Institute’s Visiting Research Scholars program provides Harvard faculty with an opportunity to strengthen collaboration with international researchers in global health. Through a six-week, in-person residency in Cambridge, MA, the program fosters deeper academic engagement and advances joint research initiatives. Dr. Wonderful Choga is a medical researcher and bioinformatician at the Botswana Harvard Health Partnership in Botswana. He holds a PhD in Medical Sciences and MSc in Medicine (Human Genetics). 

Dr. Choga is based at the Botswana Harvard Partnership (BHP), a collaboration between the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Ministry of Health of the Government of Botswana. Dr. Choga’s expertise spans computational biology, immunoinformatic, evolutionary biology, and host-pathogen interaction dynamics, with a particular focus on analyzing bacterial and viral genomes, including HIV, hepatitis viruses, and respiratory pathogens. In addition to his research contributions (>50 publications; >2900 citations), he is at the forefront of bioinformatics education, both regionally and internationally. 

In partnership with Professor Alicia Yamin at The Petri Flom Center at the Harvard Law School and Professor Yonatan Grad in the Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, the 2024 – 2025 research scholars will advance their global health research work, which ranges from a project that examines how forms of institutional corruption affect the delivery of mental health care to advancing bioinformatics for comprehensive pathogen detection and analysis using metagenomic data. 

https://globalhealth.harvard.edu/engage-with-us/visiting-scholars/