Rita Afriyie Boateng was awarded a Ph.D. degree in computational biology and bioinformatics from Rhodes University, South Africa in April 2022. This was made possible with the guidance of Dr Anita Ghansah and her school supervisors over the course of three and half years.
During her Ph.D. she worked on drug discovery and resistance mutation approaches to curb infectious diseases (Malaria, tuberculosis and COVID19). Results from this study have led to the publishing of three articles in high-impact factor journals as well as several collaborations and appearances at international scientific conferences to present findings.
Rita counts this as one of her greatest achievements of the year. She says, “With this degree, I am well vested in applying computational approaches to understanding biological processes. Writing codes and navigating Linux and python program language, performing protein structural analyses, database search, resistance mutations analyses, phylogenetic analysis, molecular dynamics, and docking.”
Congratulations Rita!