Mamana is a Ph.D. student in bioinformatics at the University of Cape Town where he is working on a project seeks to explore the genomic and pharmacogenomic diversity of African populations. He views bioinformatics techniques as powerful approaches that are at the intersection of mathematical sciences and biomedicine that can immensely contribute to solving global health and educational challenges, particularly on the African continent. Mamana has several years of hands-on work experience as a software developer and IT manager before he joined the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS-South Africa) in 2011 for a postgraduate diploma in mathematics, and thereafter the University of Cape Town, where he completed his master’s degree in bioinformatics in 2014. He is also a member of the CPGR H3ABioNet-node, a pan-African bioinformatics network comprising 32 bioinformatics research groups distributed amongst 15 African countries, that offers support to African researchers and their projects to develop and build bioinformatics capacity within Africa. The H3Africa initiative (http://h3africa.org) which H3ABioNet is part of, aims to contribute to the development of the necessary expertise among African scientists and to establish networks of African investigators involved in the study of genomics and environmental determinants of common diseases with the goal of improving the health of African populations.