Mhina Lukurunge

I'm a computer engineer and data scientist based in Tanzania. Right now I'm in my second semester of an MSc in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence at NM-AIST, on the government's Samia Scholarship Extended (DS/AI+), splitting my time between studying and building real things.

I'm the CTO of Omnexus Pharma Solutions Hub, a pharmacist-led firm working across regulatory affairs and digital health, where I lead the technology and digital-health side. Our main product is Tunza Nasi, a pharmacy management platform now trusted by more than 25 pharmacies across Tanzania, each one on its own secure, isolated system. Before this, I spent nearly two years as a district data officer on a CDC-funded public-health program, leading a team of 21 officers on collecting, validating, and making sense of health data. That work taught me something I keep coming back to: the hard part of data is rarely the model. It's trust, and getting the pipeline right.

What I actually care about is where this is heading: applied AI for the problems right around me. I'm working on AI in health through a buildathon at MUHAS, and my MSc research is pointing toward AI in agriculture. I came up through hands-on engineering before I specialized in DSAI, so I don't just train a model, I build the whole thing end to end. Too much of the tech I see in Tanzania only works on paper: a separate app here, a web tool there, none of them talking to each other, until people give up and abandon them all. I want to build the opposite: integrated solutions that actually hold together and scale.

Away from the screen, I play basketball, hit the gym, and fall down astrophysics rabbit holes (a lot of Neil deGrasse Tyson) and FIFA. If there's a new film in cinemas, count me in.