Mark Okello
Data Scientist
Mark is pursuing a Master's in Computer Science at Makerere University, focusing on neural machine translation on low resource languages. He received a fellowship to design and develop question answering and decision support systems for targeted surveillance and management of COVID-19 and future pandemics under the COAST grant at Makerere University. Furthermore, in 2019, Mark and his team received USD 100,000 from the Government Research and Innovation Fund grants that support high-impact research and innovations that inform national development priorities. Using survey and behavioral datasets, Mark and his team built an HIV risk score assessment tool for adolescents in Uganda.
Before joining benshi.ai, Mark was a founding partner at MedX, a health-tech company focused on laboratory diagnostic solutions. He also served as a consultant for the former UK Department for International Development through Oxford policy management on leveraging data management and analytics tools for revenue intelligence, predictive compliance, and revenue mobilization.
In his free time, Mark enjoys attending mentoring sessions. Additionally, he leads the Kampala R user group, for which he organized the first-ever satRdays conference in Sub-Saharan Africa. He is also the longest-serving Zindi Ambassador since its inception.
