Fredrick Makumbi is a public health professional involved in teaching, research and community service at Makerere University School of Public health, and a senior researcher with the Rakai Health Sciences Program since 1993. He graduated with a bachelor of Statistics (Makerere University), and Master of Health Sciences’00 and PhD’04 from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore USA, where his training at Johns Hopkins BSPH was supported by the Gates Institute and NIH Fogarty.

Dr. Makumbi’s research interests include sexual and reproductive health, Orphanhood and HIV, Evaluation of health programs, Clinical and Community Trials, Design, implementation and Statistical analysis of surveys, Equity in health services, and HIV intervention and is widely published in peer reviewed journals.  

He is currently an Associate Professor and a former deputy dean and Department Chair of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the School of Public Health, College of Health Sciences, Makerere University (Kampala, Uganda). 

Dr Makumbi has extensive community-based research experience in randomized trials and longitudinal studies related to HIV interventions, accrued over the past thirty years of affiliation with the Rakai Health Sciences program (RHSP). He has also conducted research on the impact of Anti-Retroviral Therapy (ART) on HIV prevention and survival, as well as the effect of ART on reproductive health behaviors. He has coordinated and managed large databases as well as handled critical statistical analyses on various research studies with the RHSP, including as the primary trial statistician on randomized trials of male circumcision, and acyclovir prophylaxis. 

Currently, He is the Uganda-PI on the Performance Monitoring for Action (PMA) project that works in 11 countries to collect data at community level and health facilities for the monitoring of progress of Family Planning indicators (http://pmadata.org), 2013-2025. PMA has also conducted a national survey on primary health care with findings indicating modest health care seeking. He has led on several national surveys including studies on Bilharzia to determine the national estimate of the schistosomiasis infection, and the effect of national schistosomiasis, the Post Measles-Rubella immunization campaign 2019/2020 in Uganda lead by WHO and MoH, and evaluated the “Vaccination Coverage and Its Determinants among children aged 0-59 months in Kenya and Uganda”, a baseline and endline study supported by GAVI and Living Goods through URADCA subgrant to Makerere University School of Public Health 2019-2021. 

Dr. Makumbi has extensive knowledge of Health Management Information System (HMIS) data and have co-authored from these routine records from health facilities in Uganda. I am well acquainted with data management and analysis of large and complex data on and I have worked used these important skills on Projects such as Research for Scalable Solutions (R4S, 2019-2024; https://www.fhi360.org/projects/research-scalable-solutions-r4s) an implementation science research to improve the efficiency, cost-effectiveness and equity of family planning programs; and I have published on Socio-economic and education related inequalities on Family planning on the RISE Project, and conducted secondary data analyses of national survey data and DHIS/HMIS on the Partnership to Enhance Analytical Capacity and Data Use (PERSUDA, 2021-2024) project, authored on the risky sexual behaviors among adolescent and young people (2023). 

In 2018, he conducted two international trainings in data management and statistical analysis to improve public health through data use sponsored by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) at the Ministry of health, Family Health & Nutrition Unit in Seychelles and, at the National Food Technology Research Center in Botswana and is a member of ethical review committees (IRC) at the National AIDS Research Committee and, the Higher degrees Research and Ethics committee at Makerere University School of Public Health. 

"One of my desires is to see increased data use for decision making with a lens of reducing inequalities and inequities across social, economic, and geographical gradients for enhanced population health and wellbeing nationally and globally", says Dr. Makumbi.