ABOUT Marta Vicente-Crespo

Dr. Vicente-Crespo has close to 13 years of experience in strengthening research capacity at several African universities and research institutions. She oversees research capacity-strengthening initiatives with a focus on African institutions and on providing research-conducive environments for early-career researchers’ progression into research leadership positions.

Before moving to Kenya, she spent six years in Uganda, where she was a senior lecturer at the Department of Biochemistry at Kampala International University (KIU) Western Campus (Ishaka, Bushenyi) and later at St Augustine International University in Kampala. While in Uganda, she organized successful technical workshops to increase postgraduate students’ and staff’s exposure to biomedical research and data analysis techniques.

In 2013, she co-founded DrosAfrica, an initiative that promotes the use of the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, in African biomedical research. Currently, most biomedical research in Africa uses expensive rodent models; this initiative promotes the use of the fruit fly as a model organism for research into human diseases and supports the establishment of fly rooms at African institutions.

Dr. Vicente-Crespo earned her doctorate in Biological Sciences in 2007  with excellent cum laude and European mention from the University of Valencia, Spain. She worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge, UK, and at the Division of Biology of the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) in the US. From there, she became a senior lecturer, the founding director of the Institute of Biomedical Research, and the founding head of the Grants Management Office at KIU.