Annettee Nakimuli, the Dean at the School of Medicine, is a leading maternal health researcher based in Uganda, focused priarily on investigating the aetiology, treatment, prevention and long term outcomes of pregnancy complications among women in Sub-Saharan Africa. She is committed to building maternal and newborn research capacity in Africa and her aim is, with East African and International colleagues, to establish a multidisciplinary centre for African maternal and neonatal health research located at Makerere University in Uganda.

Annettee is a researcher and also clinically active. Her clinical expertise is high risk obstetrics (complicated pregnancies) and works at Mulago Hospital which is the main teaching Hospital for Makerere University and has the greatest number of annual births of any hospital in sub-Saharan Africa (30,000 births per year). Her research group’s primary research interest is pre-eclampsia, a major cause of maternal morbidity and mortality in sub-Saharan Africa. In particular, the group is interested in identifying genetic and other risk factors for pre-eclampsia in order to improve pregnancy outcomes in Ugandan mothers. Her group is also interested in functional characterization of other pregnancy complications common in Ugandan women such as fetal growth restriction, preterm birth, intrauterine fetal death and pathogen infections during pregnancy. These studies aim at development of tools that will improve prediction, management and prevention of pre-eclampsia.