Chodziwadziwa (‘Cho’) Kabudula from University of the Witwatersrand has been awarded the 2017 JC Caldwell Fellowship and will be visiting the ANU’s School of Demography sometime next year.

Cho is a Population Health Data Scientist and Researcher affiliated with the MRC/Wits Rural Public Health & Health Transitions Research Unit (the MRC/Wits-Agincourt Research Unit) at the School of Public Health, University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa.

The Unit runs the Agincourt Health and Socio-Demographic Surveillance System (HDSS) which since 1992 has been collecting detailed longitudinal information on vital events including births, deaths, and migrations, as well as complementary data covering health, social and economic indicators in a rural population in north east South Africa. These data have been utilised to conduct population-based investigations of population and health dynamics and their determinants in this rural population. His research focuses on integrating the population-level socio-demographical, behavioural, disease and risk factor prevalence data from the surveillance population with clinical, treatment and laboratory data and applying demographic, statistical, computational and informatics techniques to study population-level morbidity, mortality and utilisation of health services (i.e. outcomes and selected mediators), and their social and contextual determinants.

He has been working with Dr. Brian Houle from the ANU’s School of Demography and to date they have co-authored with two research articles that have been published in peer-review journals,