Quick Facts
Biography
Marc Twagirumukiza (born 1973, in Rwanda) is a Belgian physician and a senior clinical researcher in the field of Clinical Pharmacology, Cardiovascular, Bioinformatics and Semantic Web in Health Sciences. He is chair of W3C Healthcare Schema Vocabulary Community Group.
Education
Twagirumukiza Marc is physician and graduated with PhD in clinical pharmacology from Ghent University, Belgium in 2010.
Academic and medical career
He served as physician in University Hospital Butare, Southern Province of Rwanda and lecturer in the former Faculty of medicine at National University of Rwanda currently known as College of Medicine and Health Sciences at University of Rwanda from 2001 to 2005. He was also visiting lecturer in couple of African schools of Medicine (Rwanda, Burundi, Mozambique, and Kenya among others) from 2001 to 2013.
He is currently serving as professor of medicine -clinical pharmacology at Ghent University and active in various medical and life science research areas: Clinical Pharmacology and Clinical Trials,public health, experimental research, and clinical research in medicine.
Other area includes clinical and hospital studies, cardiovascular research (mainly high blood pressure and arterial stiffness in Sub-Saharan Africa), access to medicines (availability, funding and supply chain, pricing and affordability, regulation and policies) in low and middle income countries, and primary health care.
Semantic web activities and career
Twagirumukiza Marc is also interested in Semantic Web in Health Sciences: clinical information models, ontology, terminology, standards and Interoperability, medical knowledge representation and reasoning in electronic health records.
He participated in the architecture of the Common Information Modelused by the semantic layer in SALUS project. By its name, SALUS project (2012-2015), stands for "Scalable, Standard based Interoperability Framework for Sustainable Proactive Post Market Safety Studies". Its goals was to provide a functional interoperability profiles enabling exchange of EHRs, the Semantic interoperability solutions enabling meaningful interpretation of the exchanged EHRs, the Security and Privacy mechanisms ensuring EHRs are shared in an ethical and safe way, a novel framework for open-ended temporal pattern discovery for safety studies on top of EHR Systems and the implementation of high potential use cases enabling secondary use of EHRs for post market safety studies.
Twagirumukiza Marc is the founder and currently the chair of W3C Healthcare Schema Vocabulary Community Group.
Networks and societies
Twagirumukiza Marc is member of scientific societies at international level including the Belgian Hypertension Committee, and others. On African continent he is known also in activities of scientific societies including among others the Pan-African Society of Cardiology (PASCAR), Hypertension Task Force.
PASCAR is an organisation of physicians from across Africa involved in prevention and treatment of cardiovascular disease and is concerned by the lack of progress in the diagnosis and effective treatment of cardiovascular disease across Africa.
Twagirumukiza Marc was also one of the scientists who started the African Society of Hypertension (AfSoH) Initiative, the consortium of health professionals and researchers active in field of arterial hypertension on African continent.