Prof. Benjamin Kumwenda is an Associate Professor of Bioinformatics & Computational Biology at the Kamuzu University of Health Sciences in Malawi. He is the research lead for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at the University. His research interests are in comparative genomics, bacterial pathogenesis, transcriptomics, next generation sequencing (NGS) and protein modelling. He works on the pathogenesis of Salmonella to understand drug resistance mechanisms using NGS, transcriptomics and protein modelling techniques. He has worked extensively on the Next Generation Sequencing of viral genomes particularly Rotavirus and SARS-CoV-2.

Benjamin Kumwenda holds a BSc Degree in Computer Science from University of Malawi, Chancellor College; a Postgraduate Diploma, Honors and an MSc Degree in Computer Science from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. He obtained a PhD in Bioinformatics from the University of Pretoria, South Africa in April 2014. He has done Postdoctoral Research Fellowships with the Malawi-Liverpool Wellcome Trust under the H3Africa Bioinformatics Network (H3BioNet). In 2016 he was awarded the prestigious MRC African Research Excellence Fund (AREF) Postdoctoral Fellowship. He is also an awardee of the RISE Graduate Competitive Fund. In 2018, he was awarded the three-years AESA-RISE Postdoctoral Fellowship.