The 6th DS-I Africa Consortium Meeting took place from Friday 15 to Thursday 21 May 2026 — the final consortium meeting of the initiative. DS-I Africa is an NIH Common Fund Initiative that aims to leverage data science technologies to transform biomedical and public health research and develop solutions that improve health for individuals and populations across Africa. The HE²AT Center took part with presentations, a datathon-winning team, plenary session speakers, and a lineup of posters.
Presentations
Three HE²AT-affiliated researchers presented in the Early Career Researchers Session on Tuesday 19 May:
- Effah Jemima N'da presented “Impact of Maternal Heat Exposure on the Risk of Preterm Birth and Spontaneous Abortion in Yopougon.”
- Anotida Marrian Chapunza presented “ETIQUET – EXtrapolating Temperature and aIr QUality Exposure in Space and Time: A Semi-Supervised Learning Framework for Environmental Intelligence in Data-Scarce Settings.”
- Handsome Bongani Nyoni presented “Air Pollution Exposure Trajectory Analyzer (APEX-T): A Web Application for Profiling Personal Air Pollution Exposure Trajectories from Low-Cost Sensor Data to Support Health Risk Assessment.”
Plenary Sessions
Plenary sessions bring the full consortium together to hear cross-cutting research from across the DS-I Africa network, rather than the narrower, track-based sessions held elsewhere in the programme. HE²AT researchers featured in both of this meeting’s plenaries:
Data Science for Maternal, Child, and Environmental Health (Wednesday 20 May):
- Tamara Govindasamy — CHEAQI-MNCH: CHaracterizing Effects of Air Quality In Maternal, Newborn and Child Health
- Prestige Tatenda Makanga — Developing data science solutions to mitigate the health impacts of climate change in Africa: the HE²AT Center; and The Heat Before Birth: Pan-African individual-participant-data meta-analysis of ambient heat and pregnancy outcomes
From Infrastructure to Insight: Building Skills and Systems for Scalable Health Research in Africa (Thursday 21 May):
- Natasha Lalloo — HE²AT: The HarmonAIze Project: Pioneering Automated Climate and Health Data Harmonization and Integration
Datathon
The DS-I Africa-MUDSReH Health Datathon ran on 16–17 May 2026. Hosted with the Mbarara Data Science Research Hub (MUDSReH), the event was a landmark collaborative gathering, convening leading talent across Africa in data science, medicine, engineering, and public health.
The initiative was dedicated to addressing one of the continent’s most critical challenges: the evaluation and contextual adaptation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) models for deployment in real-world African healthcare settings. As the organisers put it, this was not just a competition — it was a shared mission to question, test, and improve AI tools so they reflect African patient realities and support clinicians and health systems with solutions that are relevant, inclusive, and impactful.
Seven teams registered. Group 4 — Embedding Quality Comparison Benchmark — won, with HE²AT team members Natasha Lalloo and Anotida Marrian Chapunza.
Poster Lounge
Click a poster title below to view and download it.
- The HarmonAIze Toolkit: Automated Health Data Harmonisation and Climate Integration
- ETIQUET – EXtrapolating Temperature and aIr QUality Exposure in Space and Time: A Semi-Supervised Learning Framework for Environmental Intelligence in Data-Scarce Settings
- Heat exposure and adverse pregnancy outcomes in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire
- Integrated analysis of social media and temperature data to define thermal sensitivity thresholds in urban environments in Abidjan (Côte d’Ivoire)
- Hot Nights, Sleepy Days: Temperature & Daytime Sleepiness in Johannesburg Adults (2017–2018)
- Harmonizing Johannesburg Cohorts for Climate–Health Analytics
- Heat Vulnerability Index: Scaling up through DHIS2
- An Automated Neural Centric Machine Learning Pipeline