Adaobi Chine

Adaobi Chine holds an MBA from the UW Foster School of Business, along with a Master's degree in Finance from Cranfield University, England, and a Bachelor's degree in Business Economics from the American University of Nigeria. Prior to her MBA studies, Adaobi was a management consultant at KPMG and Deloitte, as well as a banker. Her professional experience cuts across organization restructuring, strategy development, process improvement and project management. Adaobi is passionate about using technology to improve businesses and communities.

Adaobi worked on five projects during her one-year engagement at START, acting as the Project Manager for one of them. Adaobi provided her respective teams with strategic support through a business lens. Below are highlights from two of the projects Adaobi worked on:

• Understanding COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy among Nigerian Healthcare Providers: The team was tasked by BMGF to gather information on types of Nigerian healthcare providers, and the themes driving COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy among them in order to determine a messaging approach that will be effective input for a media campaign to reduce COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy among Nigerian healthcare providers. Adaobi served as the Project Manager for this project.
• LFAs for COVID-19: The START team was engaged by BMGF to provide a landscaping of the current global market and production capacity for the nitrocellulose analytical membrane components of lateral flow assays (LFAs), operating under the assumption that this would be a key bottleneck for LFA manufacturers as test developers are asked to scale up production for COVID-19 rapid antigen tests. The team tested this assumption and created an informative landscaping presentation through key informant interviews with LFA test developers and nitrocellulose membrane producers.
• Pathogen Genomic Sequencing Use Cases in Africa: The aim of this project was to support strategic thinking surrounding use-cases to communicate the value of genomic sequencing in Africa. Specific objectives included developing an approach to prioritizing pathogen genomic sequencing (PGS) use cases based on a country’s disease burden, public health priorities, and potential public health impact of PGS, using case-studies, landscape use-cases of PGS that may be of greatest public health value, and proposing an approach to estimating the economic value of investing in PGS capacity for public health in Africa. To complete these objectives, the START team met with key informants, reviewed academic and grey literature, researched infectious disease burden across countries, assessed current capacity, priorities, and needs across countries, compiled prior applications of PGS, and determined national, regional, and global priorities related to PGS.

Adaobi currently works at Adobe as a Senior Engineering Program Manager at Adobe.