Dr David Kateete: Transitioning to the next chapter after the EDCTP Career Development Fellowship

The long-term goal of EDCTP Career Development Fellow Dr David Kateete (Uganda) was to build capacity and advance his career as an academic. His fellowship focused on characterising the microbiome in tuberculosis. Overall, the goals of the MTI-Plus project were achieved – with a wider impact beyond the intended scope. Dr Kateete and his team found the microbiota in treatment-naïve patients to map to characteristics like clinic visits, HIV status and nutritional status, contravening findings from Asia and/or the developed countries and implying that the microbiome plays a role in TB disease dynamics in settings with high HIV prevalence. The fellowship also supported two Masters trainees: one secured a relevant job (Data/Scientific Officer) and the other a PhD fellowship. A PhD trainee supported throughout the fellowship, whose studies are on-going, was successful in securing a Commonwealth scholarship. Having established a multidisciplinary research team, the team applied and won a grant from the NIH (1U01TW012534-01). The aim is to leverage the MTI-Plus datasets and apply data science methods to unravel the complexity underlying TB. Towards the end of the fellowship, Dr Kateete was promoted to Associate Professor and appointed Dean, School of Biomedical Sciences.