Dr. Halfan Ngowo is a Research Fellow in Disease Modelling at the Gates Foundation, where he focuses on vector modelling, and an affiliate Senior Research Scientist at the Ifakara Health Institute (IHI). He holds a PhD in Population and Ecosystem Health from the University of Glasgow.

Dr. Ngowo has been part of IHI for more than a decade, rising from Research Intern to Senior Research Scientist in 2022. From 2014 to 2025 he coordinated IHI’s Outdoor Mosquito Control (OMC) research group. He set up a self-sustaining peer-to-peer mentorship programme in statistical data analysis for medical entomologists, which transformed the Institute’s research culture.

A quantitative ecologist, he specialises in Bayesian methods, applying state-of-the-art inference techniques to imperfect, messy field data to estimate the size and dynamics of mosquito populations and how they respond to environmental conditions. He also combines infrared spectroscopy with machine learning to determine mosquito age, helping research groups evaluate malaria interventions.

Dr. Ngowo has published more than 80 widely cited scientific works, is one of IHI’s most cited young scientists, and serves on the editorial board of Malaria Journal as an Associate Editor. He is a member of the MoDHA consortium, which brings together 12 research projects, and leads its climate modelling project on how extreme weather affects malaria transmission in Tanzania and Mozambique.

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