Kurayi Chawatama

Kurayi Chawatama

Molecular Biology and Genetics Undergraduate Student

About Me

I am Kurayi Chawatama, a Zimbabwean undergraduate in Molecular Biology and Genetics at Uludağ University in Bursa, Türkiye.

I have participated in research and internships at various institutions in Türkiye and Sweden (Karolinska Institutet). My research experience has primarily focused on using single-cell multiomics approaches to understand cancer heterogeneity and drug resistance. In the long term, I aim to expand and apply these approaches within a systems biology framework to facilitate next-generation disease phenotyping, from the population level down to the cellular scale. I am particularly interested in understanding vaccine efficacy and immune responses in tropical infectious diseases.

I actively contribute to the open-source bioinformatics community through the nf-core initiative, primarily working on the scRNA-Seq downstream analysis pipeline (nf-core/scdownstream) and serving on the core outreach team. Additionally, I am involved in academic and student-led scientific societies, particularly yEFIS and ISCB-RSG Türkiye, where I help with training and outreach initiatives.

Outside of research, I have a passion for robotics. I lead the Science sub-team at Ulurover, a competitive Mars rover team at Uludağ University. We design and integrate robotic systems to conduct automated biological and chemical experiments in simulated Martian environments, competing in international contests organized by NASA (URC) and the European Space Agency (ERC).

Skills

  • Experimental: DNA Isolation from Blood, Restriction Digestion, PCR, Agarose Gel Electrophoresis, Bacterial Culture & Cloning
  • Computational:
    • Programming Languages: R, Python, Nextflow, Bash, Arduino
    • NGS Data Analysis: Bulk & Single Cell RNA-seq, TCR-seq, CITE-seq, Microarray, WES/WGS Processing & Variant Analysis, ChIP-seq, Methyl-seq
    • Frameworks & Environments: Slurm (Linux HPC), Conda, Docker/Singularity, Nextflow, Git, Arduino, Raspberry Pi
    • Machine Learning: Basic Scikit-learn and TensorFlow

Grants & Scholarships