Elected: 2018
Country (Nationality)
South Africa
Discipline
Medical & Health Sciences
Bio
Professor Mulder graduated with a Bachelor degree, cum laude, in Chemistry and Microbiology, and a first class Honours degree in Microbiology, followed by a PhD in Medical Microbiology. She then moved into the field of Bioinformatics and was employed at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) in Cambridge for 8.5 years, as a Team Leader responsible for development of InterPro and the Gene Ontology Annotation Projects.
She currently heads the Computational Biology Division in the Department of Integrative Biomedical Sciences at the University of Cape Town (UCT) (http://www.cbio.uct.ac.za) and is a full member of the Institute for Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine. Her research is in the area of bioinformatics of infectious diseases, including pathogen and host genomics and biological networks, African population genetics, human variation and disease, and microbiome studies. Her group also provides bioinformatics support and training to UCT researchers and beyond. She has over 140 publications, and in 2016 was elected to the University of Cape Town College of Fellows.
Internationally, Prof Mulder is involved in capacity development in Africa, as leader of H3ABioNet, a Pan-African Bioinformatics network for H3Africa. H3ABioNet is a network of 28 institutions in 16 African countries, which aims to build bioinformatics capacity for genomics research on the continent and develop the infrastructure for managing large-scale genomics data. She is a member of more than 6 different advisory boards for international projects and training initiatives and is on the Board of Directors for the International Society for Computational Biology. She plays a leading role in Bioinformatics education in South Africa, the rest of Africa and globally.