Frank Kato

Works as Bioinformatician/Senior Laboratory Technologist for the Crick African Network (CAN) HIV-1 reservoir Kinetic study.

Bioinformatician/Senior Laboratory Technologist - MRC/UVRI and LSHTM Uganda Research Unit - Uganda

(2025-03 - 2026-08)

Works as Bioinformatician/Senior Laboratory Technologist for the Crick African Network (CAN) HIV-1 reservoir Kinetic study.

• Isolation of HIV proviral DNA from PBMCs
• Measuring the size of the HIV reservoir using the Intact proviral DNA assay
• Single genome amplification
• Oxford Nanopore sequencing
• Development and Implementation of bioinformatics pipelines
• Developing machine learning algorithms for understanding HIV reservoir behaviours
• Training interns
• Grant and manuscript writing

Laboratory Technologist - MRC/UVRI and LSHTM Uganda Research Unit - Uganda

(2017-12 - 2025-03)

Worked as a laboratory technologist for the International AIDS vaccine Initiative programme. Was responsible for the generation of HIV infectious molecular clones to characterize the biological properties of the most common viral strains being transmitted and not transmitted in Uganda and Kenya. Additionally, worked on chimeric viruses containing gag/pol genes of the HIV1-1 Transmitted/Founder (T/F) viruses to characterize their biological properties and contribution to virulence among the subtypes A1, D and A1D recombinants in Uganda.

Also trained undergraduate student interns.

• QIAMP Viral RNA Extraction
• cDNA synthesis
• Single genome amplification
• Sanger Sequencing
• Oxford Nanopore sequencing
• Base calling, quality control, read assembly, read alignment, and variant calling
• Gene cloning
• Generation of viral stocks by transfection of PBMCs and 293T cells with IMC plasmid DNA and chimeras
• Titration for infectivity in TZM-bl cells expressing β-galactosidase
• Determination of replicative capacity scores by p24 quantitation in supernatants using a colorimetric reverse transcriptase ELISA assay

Bioinformatics Student Intern - Makerere University - Uganda

(2023-04 - 2023-12)

Worked as Bioinformatics student intern in the big data science group (ACE in Bioinformatics and Data Science) where acquired practical skills in using machine learning algorithms to predict whether a suspect qualifies for a COVID-19 diagnostic test.

• Pre-processed the raw data in a format that can be accepted by machine learning algorithms
• Trained the model on the cleaned data
• Tested the model on new data to check how well it performs
• Deployed the model to test predict who qualified for the COVID-19 diagnostic test

MSc - Bioinformatics - Makerere University, Uganda (2022-02 - 2024-10)

BSc - Biotechnology - Makerere University, Uganda (2013-08 - 2016-06)