Christopher Kasanga graduated with a Bachelor of Veterinary Medicine from the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine (currently the College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Science) at Sokoine University of Agriculture (SUA) in 1999. Christopher pursued his MSc studies in Microbiology and Virology at SUA from 2000 to 2002. From 2004 to 2008 he did a PhD on Molecular Virology at Gifu University in Japan where he studied the molecular biological characteristics of emerging infectious bursal disease virus. He came to SUA in 1999 to work as a Research Assistant in Avian Medicine and Virology. In 2006 he was employed at SUA as a Faculty Member in the Department of Microbiology, Parasitology, and Biotechnology. Since 2010 he has been working (first as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Southern African Centre for Infectious Disease Surveillance (SACIDS), Lecturer, as Senior Lecturer and then as Associate Professor/Professor) at the College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Science (CVMBS). During that time, he also obtained a postdoctoral certificate on foot-and-mouth disease FMD virus (FMDV) diagnostics and sequence analysis from the Institute for Animal Health (currently known as The Pirbright Institute), United Kingdom. In 2014 Christopher received the Wellcome Trust Intermediate Fellowship Award to study the molecular biological characteristics of FMDV in endemic settings in Africa. He also leads the molecular biology and biotechnology research laboratory at CVMBS, SUA.
