At the 19th INTEREST Conference in Windhoek, Namibia, Uganda’s Clark Joshua Brianwong received the prestigious Charles Boucher Award for his high-scoring scientific abstract submitted as an African early-career researcher.
CLARK JOSHUA BRIANWONG
Clark Joshua Brianwong’s interest in science started in childhood. He would dismantle his friend’s toys to find out how they worked, for instance.
“Or, where we grew up in the village, there were fences and we would take wire from them to make cars,” Clark explains from the city of Mbale in Uganda. His name, calm demeanour, and usual outfit of black-rimmed glasses with button-up shirts remind you of Superman’s alter ego, Clark Kent.
Around 1998, his interest in science took a personal turn: Clark’s mother had been diagnosed with tuberculosis (TB).
“At the time, the treatment for TB took eight months,” he says. “At that young age, I saw how my mother was suffering. The place where she would get TB treatment from was about 10 km from where we were staying, and back then, the drugs were not a fixed dose, so she’d have very many pills to take.”
A quarter of a century later, Clark Joshua is supporting health teams to make sure people can get diagnosed and start treatment for TB right where they live. As TB Programme Specialist at the Baylor Foundation, his novel approach to pinpointing villages likely to have TB patients has led to an increase in diagnosed cases and reduced the cost of doing so by 41%.
Incorporated into national TB programme
For the study that Clark Joshua presented at INTEREST 2025, he was awarded the Charles Boucher award for one of the highest-scoring scientific abstracts submitted by an African early-career researcher. The title in full is: “Leveraging eCBSS data for geospatial mapping of tuberculosis hotspots and optimizing the integrated TB case finding (CAST+) intervention in eastern Uganda”.
Clark Joshua got the idea from seeing how GIS (short for “Geographic Information System”, a way of digitally representing geographic data) is used to map traffic jams. Working with his team, they ensured all their region’s data from paper-based TB registers were entered into Uganda’s electronic case-based surveillance system for TB and leprosy so they could then identify villages where TB cases were more likely to be found.
“It was very challenging cleaning the data and trying to make sense of it,” Clark Joshua explains. “We would find the naming of some villages was different from the names in the GIS shapefiles, and sometimes, other data was missing. So, there was a vigorous back and forth with the facility teams.”
Once they had a list of villages, community health workers embarked on a campaign to screen residents for TB and various other health issues. Support from a mobile digital X-ray kit and a driver who could ferry samples to the nearest TB facility meant TB cases could be rapidly identified. Costing $37 per patient diagnosed, the team shaved $29 off the cost of identifying each TB case.
Uganda’s ministry of health has now embedded their approach in the national TB programme. And at INTEREST, Clark Joshua shared details of their approach with peers from Zambia, Mozambique, Namibia, and other Ugandan colleagues.
First international conference
INTEREST 2025 was the very first international conference Clark Joshua attended. He is currently finalizing the thesis for his master’s degree in public health at Makerere University. If all goes well, he hopes to share the findings – about the diagnostic cut-off for latent TB cases – at next year’s iteration.
When he’s not working, Clark Joshua relaxes by reading widely, playing volleyball, or going to rally car races – sometimes participating in them too. He also loves hiking in Uganda’s mountains.
And always, whether it’s in his free time or at the INTEREST conference, the young researcher enjoys talking with new people who have new ideas.
“One highlight of INTEREST was interacting with researchers from across the continent and getting their insights into how they have modelled different interventions,” Clark says. “Another was witnessing the vast capability that we have as a continent and the home-grown ideas that will help us improve the lives of our people.”
