Philippa Ngaju Makobore

Ms. Philippa Ngaju Makobore is an Electrical Engineer and is currently the Department Head of the Instrumentation Division at the Uganda Industrial Research Institute (UIRI). She graduated from the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada with a BSc in Electrical Engineering in 2008.  She briefly worked at a South African telecommunications company, MTN from 2009 to 2010 as an intern telecommunications engineer and thereafter sales engineer before venturing into electronics applications design and development at UIRI in early 2011. Her team comprises of electrical and computer engineers that design and develop electronic applications for Healthcare, Agriculture and Energy. To date the Division’s portfolio has over 7 projects which she supervises, with 3 medical device prototypes in their advanced stages. These projects have won both international and local awards including a 1st place Innovation Award at the 2016 World Patient Safety, Science and Technology Summit. The Division has a 100% acceptance rate for oral presentations at highly regarded Medical Engineering Conferences including the Canadian Biomedical and Medical Engineering Conference, the IEEE and the World Congress for Biomedical Engineering and Medical Physics of which she was once a session chair for the Medical Devices track. Furthermore, Ms. Makobore has laid the foundation for close relationships with academia, research institutes, private companies and societies both locally and internationally for knowledge transfer and capacity building. A few of these partners include Columbia University in New York, Addis Ababa University, Makerere University and Mbarara University of Science and Technology. Ms. Makobore’s primary interest is in the improvement of the disadvantaged healthcare sector in Uganda.