Predictive Model

Sunday Ekesi of the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology in Kenya and Josh Tewskbury of Future Earth in the U.S. will model the effects of climate change on major food crops and their insect pests to better forecast crop yields and inform intervention strategies. The changing climate will likely have a multitude of effects on both insect-pest populations, by affecting their size and activity, and on crop physiology, which together will affect yield.

Lemu Golassa of Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia and Laurent Dembele of University of Science, Techniques and Technology of Bamako in Mali will analyze the malaria-causing parasite Plasmodium vivax to identify molecules that enable it to transform into a dormant hypnozoite form in the liver, which is thought to be the key obstacle to malaria elimination. In many regions, P.

Zaza Ndhlovu of the Africa Health Research Institute in South Africa and Fekadu Tafesse of Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) will identify the molecular mechanisms enabling HIV to survive in humans to help develop new therapies to fully eradicate the disease. Potent antiretroviral therapies have rendered HIV a manageable chronic disease, but it is still incurable. Needing daily medication over a lifetime makes this approach ultimately expensive and also challenging to maintain in low-resource settings.

The Voz Workers' Rights Education Project in the U.S. will develop a new legal clinic model and create a public campaign to raise awareness and understanding among the day-laborer community and its employers about the structural and historic barriers to their economic mobility. Day laborers, who are largely immigrants, refugees, and people of color, face low wages, insecure work, poor working conditions, and wage theft, causing many to live below the poverty level. Despite being disproportionately impacted, many day laborers do not qualify for federal stimulus funding for COVID-19.

Sangeeta Jobanputra of Connecti3 LLC in the U.S. together with the University of Rwanda and Multiverse Investments will develop a method that uses existing datasets and predictive analytics to better plan all types of health campaigns to broaden their coverage and minimize costs. The challenge of identifying those in need of a specific health service is a barrier to successful health campaigns. To address this, they will use existing databases to identify and score predictors of higher risk to a specific health condition, such as level of poverty in vitamin A deficiency.

Jacaranda Health's mission is to transform maternal healthcare in East Africa with high-quality, low-cost, and respectful maternity services. Jacaranda owns a maternity hospital in peri-urban Nairobi where we develop innovations in service delivery and demand-side interventions to improve access to care. We also partner with public hospitals to adapt and replicate those innovations so that they can improve quality of care for mothers in the public sector.

Kevin Osteen of Vanderbilt University Medical Center in the U.S. is developing a three-dimensional cell model that mimics the lining of the human uterus (endometrium), including different cell types and a vascular system, that can be used for affordable medium-to-high-throughput compound screening to discover new contraceptives with minimal adverse side effects. The endometrium is a multi-layered tissue that supports embryo implantation and maintains pregnancy and responds to hormonal cues to undergo renewal during each menstrual cycle.

Charles Easley of the University of Georgia Research Foundation in the U.S. is developing a complete human spermatogenesis model system for high-throughput drug screens to identify new compounds that reversibly block the maturation of sperm and could be used as male contraceptives. A simple oral male contraceptive would lessen the burden on women, particularly those who suffer from adverse side-effects of hormonal contraceptives.

Alison Bentley of the National Institute of Agricultural Botany and Ari Sadanandom of the University of Durham both in the United Kingdom will examine whether a new molecular link that they found explaining the increase in plant diseases (biotic factors) associated with high nutrient levels (abiotic factors) can be exploited to maximize wheat crop yield with minimal negative impact on the environment. Wheat, one of the first domesticated food crops, has been grown for over 10,000 years and is critically important to global food supply.

William Martin of the International Food Policy Research Institute in the U.S. will combine existing, high-quality survey data collected from individual households in rural Ethiopia and Nigeria with agricultural information from the Global Agro-Ecological Zone (GAEZ) database to model the impact of specific investments on poor communities to better inform policy decisions. National Agricultural Investment Plans (NAIPS) shape policy development by outlining investments required to stimulate growth in Africa through transformation of the agricultural sector.