The Partnership for Enhanced Engagement (PEER), is a grant program that partners with the US National Academy of Sciences Engineering and Medicine and the USAID, to provide research grant to scientists in developing countries.

To encourage more women from the developing countries to retain careers in the Science Technology Engineering and Medicine (STEM) fields, PEER and COACh global with support from the USAID initiated a call in early 2018 for selected cohorts of women from across the world to participate in a 3-day mentorship program in Kigali, Rwanda and the chance for the participants (mentees) to compete for a seed grant of $10.000.

The UHAS cohort, one of 10 selected out of 500 applications was made up of Prof. Margaret Gyapong of the Institute of Health Research (mentor) and Dr. Grace Kpeli and Dr. Adjoa Boakye both of the School of Basic and Biomedical Sciences as mentees.

We are proud to announce that on the 15th of July 2019, our cohort with Dr. Adjoa Boakye as PI was awarded one of the competitive PEER Women’s Mentorship Seed Grants. The project proposal is aimed at understanding the role of the gut microbiome in hypertension. It seeks to among other things use non-traditional approaches to identify additional risk factors for the development of hypertension. It is our goal that this research will revolutionize the treatment and management of hypertension to include possible incorporation of pre and probiotics.  In the long term, we envision that UHAS will become a centre of excellence in microbiome research within the African sub-region. Long live UHAS.