News - Two More MSc. Students defend their Theses before Examiners

The Biostatistics programme announces yet another milestone after seeing two of its students successfully defend their theses before a panel of examiners and the Faculty of Science. It was all joy to Mafase Noxolo Ng'ong'ola Sesani and Andrew Mganga when the Chair of the meeting, Dr. Levis Eneya who is also Dean of the Faculty announced the viva voce verdicts to each of the candidates on the afternoon of Thursday, 25th February, 2016. The candidates' work has been passed by both viva panelists and thesis examiners. Mafase's thesis was titled "Predictors of CD4 cell count recovery in a cohort of HIV/AIDS patients on ART at Chilumba Community Hospital in Karonga, Malawi: A prognostic scoring system (Nomogram) approach" while that of Andrew was titled "Attrition of women initiating Antiretroviral Therapy under Option B+: A Cox Proportional Hazards, Competing Risks, and Multi-state survival models". Mafase's work was supervised by Dr. Mavuto Mukaka while Andrew's was supervised by Associate Professor Lawrence Kazembe.

Each candidate's thesis in the programme is marked by 3 independent examiners (External Examiner who is normally someone outside University of Malawi and an expert in Statistics; Internal Examiner who can be within University of Malawi but must be familiar with the field of Statistics; and Internal Assessor who is within University of Malawi but may not necessarily be an expert in Statistics). All the 3 examiners passed the candidates' work. In addition, the viva voce panelists independently assessed the students' knowledge and mastery of the work being presented and were convinced to pass the work. This means that the candidates will be now waiting for final decisions by the Chancellor College Postgraduate Committee and University Senate before they can prepare for graduation. Mafase joined the programme in September 2011 while Andrew joined in 2012. If the final Senate decision favours the candidates, then the programme will have graduated 20 students since its inception in 2010. We shower our congratulatory and best wish messages to Mafase and Andrew as they prepare to join the family of Biostatisticians in Africa and World over.