Call for Applicants (PhD and Postdoc) 2026 - 2027.
The Hasso Plattner Institute's Digital Health Cluster and the University of Cape Town are partnering together to advance global health research, capacity development, and innovation in Africa. Our 2026-2030 agreement brings the UCT School of Public Health into our collaboration.
The partnership will particularly support projects in the areas of maternal and child health, infectious disease, non-communicable diseases (NCDs), mental health, and stigma-sensitive conditions, leveraging routine health data, participatory design, and responsible AI to ensure ethical, equitable, and context-aware digital health innovation.
To this end, the HPI-UCT Digital Health Partnership shall promote and encourage:
- The education of the brightest PhD students from sub-Saharan Africa. The aim is to offer attractive funding to this pool of candidates for whom few other funding channels are available for study at South African universities.
- Development of strong research collaborations with others in the Hasso-Plattner Institute (HPI) as a leading world establishment in information technology.
- Expand the use of African health datasets to support safe access, advanced analysis and shared student and faculty projects based on real-world data.
- Build capacity through the development of new digital health curriculum and seminars across the School of Public Health and School of IT.
The program aims to train Africa’s next generation of digital health researchers, foster interdisciplinary research, and address pressing global health inequities. These inequities increasingly include the rising burden of NCDs, including mental health conditions, and stigma-related barriers to care, which shape health outcomes across the life course in LMIC settings and require integrated, ethically grounded digital health solutions. The partnership is explicitly designed to foster cross-collaboration between disciplines and departments, including public health, computer science, information systems, and human-centred design. In the context of the Global South, such collaboration is essential to ensure that digital health innovations are context-aware, locally relevant, and responsive to diverse health system realities. This approach supports innovation that emerges from African settings, rather than being transferred uncritically from high-income contexts.
Since the HPI Research School at UCT began its work in 2009, 28 scholarship holders from 16 countries have successfully completed their PhD theses.
For queries about HPI - please send your email to hpi-admin@uct.ac.za.
The school is financially supported by the Hasso Plattner Institute for Digital Engineering.