Rate My Professor Nicola Mulder

Professor Nicola Mulder is a professor and head of the Computational Biology Division at the University of Cape Town. She holds a bachelor’s degree in chemistry and microbiology, an honours degree in microbiology, and a PhD from the University of Cape Town awarded in 1998 for her thesis on the identification and characterisation of transcriptional regulatory proteins from Mycobacterium tuberculosis.

Prior to her appointment at UCT, Professor Mulder worked for approximately eight years at the European Bioinformatics Institute in Cambridge, where she served as a team leader responsible for resources including InterPro and the Gene Ontology Annotation Project. She was appointed Associate Professor and Head of the Computational Biology Division at UCT in 2009 and promoted to full professor in 2014. Her research focuses on genomics, including the development of tools and resources for African genomics, genetic determinants of disease susceptibility, African population genetic diversity, microbiomes, and microbial genomics and infectious diseases from both host and pathogen perspectives. Professor Mulder leads or has led major initiatives such as H3ABioNet, a pan-African bioinformatics network, and contributes to the DS-I Africa Open Data Science Platform. She is actively involved in bioinformatics training and education across Africa, including curriculum development and serving on international committees such as those of the International Society for Computational Biology and the Global Organisation for Bioinformatics Learning, Education and Training. Her contributions have been recognised with awards including election to the UCT College of Fellows in 2016, an NRF B2 rating in 2018, Fellowship of the African Academy of Sciences in 2018, and ISCB Fellowship in 2025.