Rosemary Ida Kabahuma

Rosemary Ida Kabahuma is an otorhinolaryngologist, a head and neck surgeon, and a scientist with special interest in hearing loss and inner-ear function whose research focuses on the search for deafness genes among sub-Saharan African populations. She seeks to raise the quality of healthcare and lay a foundation for diagnostic protocols and management strategies for genetic deafness among individuals of sub-Saharan African descent. Her penultimate goal is to use this information in hearing-loss prevention and for personalized management of hearing loss among affected individuals in order to enable them to become fully integrated, productive members of society.

At Radcliffe, Kabahuma is focusing on building a repository of knowledge of deafness genes prevalent in sub-Saharan Africa and on unravelling these gene profiles and the diagnostic challenges they pose among sub-Saharan Africans. She will be collaborating with other researchers at Harvard working in disciplines related to hearing loss. 

Kabahuma earned an MBChB degree from Makerere University, an MMed in ENT surgery from the University of Nairobi, an MSc in audiological medicine from University College London, and a PhD in audiology from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. She is currently completing a PhD in human genetics from the University of Pretoria. Her work has attracted funding from the Mellon Foundation, the South African Medical Research Council, and, through her US collaborators, the United States National Institutes of Health, among others. She is a former Fulbright Senior Scholar Award recipient and a member of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology.