About the instructor:
Christina Myalla is a data scientist and data engineer at the Malaria Atlas Project (MAP) Dar es Salaam office, based at the Ifakara Health Institute in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and jointly affiliated with the Kids Research Institute in Australia. With a master’s degree in health informatics from the University of Dar es Salaam and more than ten years of practical research experience, she works at the intersection of geospatial analysis, health systems research, and data engineering—combining advanced computational methods with a commitment to producing data that can be directly used by national health programs.
At MAP, Christina leads the development of data pipelines and geospatial accessibility modeling to support the planning of malaria control programs in sub-Saharan Africa. She designs and deploys interactive tools, including R Shiny dashboards and web portals, which are used by national malaria control programs and partner organizations to guide evidence-based decision-making.
Event Summary
AMMnet hosted a hands-on hackathon session led by Christina Myalla, guiding participants through building a fully interactive malaria dashboard using R Shiny and the modern bslib framework. Over two focused hours, participants worked through the core building blocks of Shiny development — constructing user interfaces with input controls and outputs, implementing reactive expressions, and deploying finished apps to the web via shinyapps.io.
The session drew on realistic simulated malaria data modeled on real epidemiological patterns for Burkina Faso, giving participants practical, contextually relevant experience applying these tools in a malaria setting. Designed for participants with advanced R experience, attendees left the session with a working, shareable dashboard and the skills to build future applications independently.
The session was conducted in English and the recording and materials are made available to all AMMnet members via the AMMnet Hackathon Blog.
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