Let us all welcome Ethel Makila and Dr. Mark Wamalwa to the BecA Hub.

Ethel Makila has joined the BecA Hub as the Communications Officer.
A creative communicator with over 10 years experience in the field of graphic design, development communication, media and education. Ethel has acquired diverse experience working at Action Aid Kenya, Buru Buru Institute of Fine Arts, Nation Media Group and Development Communications. She has developed innovative, visual communication materials on development issues for various audiences and continues to contribute to the publicity and fund raising efforts of various non-profits. We are excited to have her as a member of the BecA Hub team.

Dr.  Mark Wamalwa has joined the BecA Hub as a Bioinformatics analyst.
Mark has strong statistics and computer programming skills and can write programs in several software languages such as Perl, Python, R, mysql, PHP and C++ and is particularly stimulated by problem-solving challenges. He gained experience in analyzing massive data sets while working on the International Glossina Genome Initiative (IGGI) project while at the South African National Bioinformatics Institute (SANBI) and has a good working knowledge of the assembly of Oryx bacillus and Glossina morsitans next-generation (ABI SOLiD, 454 and Illumina) short reads data.
He holds a PhD degree in Bioinformatics from the University of Western Cape, South Africa, a Master of Science degree in Bioinformatics (MBF) from Wageningen University and Research Centre (WUR), Netherlands and a Bachelor of Veterinary Medicine (BVM) degree from the University of Nairobi, Kenya.
His Interests/expertise is in application of bioinformatics to whole genome analyses and expressed Sequence Tag (EST) bioinformatics analysis. He has also developed informatics projects, NASP, a parallel program for identifying evolutionarily conserved nucleic acid secondary structures and G-ESTMAP, a web-based EST annotation pipeline.
Mark hopes to provide a positive contribution to the current research at the BecA Hub and ILRI at large. We are excited to have him as a member of the BecA Hub team.