On Thursday, April 2, 2015, the U.S. Chargée d’Affaires, Susan Zelle, led the opening ceremony of the African Center for Excellence (ACE) in Bioinformatics at the Faculté of Sciences et Techniques. The ACE was equipped by the U.S. Government’s the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The goal of the ACE initiative is to leverage in-kind donations to provide a sustainable, reliable, and local infrastructure of high-performance computing hardware coupled with bioinformatics tools, training, and mentorship designed to improve the quality of infectious disease research in Africa by Africans. The ceremony was followed with a demonstration that showed the ways researchers in the U.S. and around the world will teach the bioinformatics classes remotely. Graduate students will receive a Master’s degree in bioinformatics after two years of training.
