The Vanderbilt Institute for Global Health (VIGH), Vanderbilt Department of Biostatistics, and Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital (AKTH), longstanding collaborating institutions in the U.S. and Nigeria, have partnered on a new five-year, $1.4 million training grant from Fogarty International Center of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
The program seeks to create a cohort of highly skilled Nigerian biostatisticians with the capacity to lead and supervise high-level biostatistics activities for HIV research studies in West Africa.
The Vanderbilt-Nigeria Biostatistics Training (VN-BioStat) program leverages other successful NIH-funded training and infrastructure programs in Kano, Nigeria (V-BRCH and V-RAMP), building upon a solid foundation of collaborations between Vanderbilt, AKTH, Bayero University Kano (BUK), and Ahmadu Bello University (ABU) in Nigeria.
Bryan Shepherd, PhD, professor of Biostatistics at Vanderbilt; Nafiu Hussaini, PhD, associate professor of Mathematical Biology at BUK; and Muktar Aliyu, MD, MPH, DrPH, professor of Health Policy and Medicine at Vanderbilt and Associate Director for Research with the Vanderbilt Institute for Global Health (VIGH), serve as multiple-principal investigators (MPIs) of VN-BioStat.
Dr. Shepherd summarized the program's goal, stating, "It is important that we develop biostatistics leaders in West Africa who will not be technicians, but co-investigators, principal investigators, and thought-leaders in funded HIV/AIDS research."
Biomedical HIV research is growing in West Africa, but biostatistics support and expertise lag. The country has a critical need to build biostatistics capacity. In collaborative HIV studies between West Africa and western institutions, there are generally clinician leaders and data managers from western institutions and West Africa. Still, biostatistics leaders are almost always exclusively from western institutions.
Many statisticians in West Africa, including those trained in biostatistics, are lured away from biomedical research because of insufficient institutional support or critical mass. Funded training initiatives have successfully built biostatistics expertise in Southern Africa and East Africa during the last ten years, but no such programs exist in West Africa.
“This is an extraordinary opportunity for us to bridge the gap in biostatistics capacity in West Africa. The highly trained cohort of biostatisticians who will emerge from this program will help provide outstanding biostatistics support for scientific research in our institutions.”
The program will bring two Nigerian data scientists per year (a total of 10 over five years) to Vanderbilt to immerse them in hands-on biostatistics training for one-year fellowships. Trainees will take biostatistics courses, become members of a team of biostatisticians doing HIV research at Vanderbilt, and will be assigned to HIV research projects using data from AKTH.
The program will also host an annual workshop in Nigeria, team-taught by Vanderbilt and Nigerian investigators, to provide mid-level, hands-on biostatistics training in specific statistical techniques and their applications to HIV research. The workshops will be open to HIV researchers and data scientists from West Africa.
“VN-BioStat is a much-needed initiative that will help develop excellence in biostatistics capacity in West Africa. I am excited to work with Drs. Shepherd and Hussaini to enhance the expansion of biostatistics expertise in that part of the world.”
This work is supported by the Fogarty International Center of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number 1D43TW012268-01.
Nafiu Hussaini, PhD, 
Bryan Shepherd, PhD