Meet the Team: Mireille Grobelaar, Our New Data Scientist

We’re excited to introduce Mireille Grobbelaar, a Data Scientist who joined us at the beginning of March and has already become deeply involved in the practical work of turning data into valuable solutions for public health teams.

Mireille is part of EPCON’s data science team, where members are often assigned to specific country projects to explore portals, support prediction models, and help ensure the right information is available in the right format for decision-making. She’s been heavily involved in EPCON’s geoportal work, including setting up portals for partners and building out contextual layers that make data easier to interpret.

One key project she’s contributed to is EPCON’s partnership with Delft Imaging, a company that deploys fixed and mobile X-ray machines to rural areas for TB screening. Mireille’s work has included setting up geoportals that help visualise screening activity and enrich it with contextual data. This creates a much clearer picture of where and how services are being delivered on the ground and what the impact is in the field.

She’s also currently supporting a new project in Mozambique, where the team is building a foundational platform with demographic and contextual layers. For Mireille, joining a project at the very beginning is especially rewarding. “It’s really nice to join when you’re at the start,” she notes, before TB data even arrives, because it allows the team to design the structure thoughtfully from day one.

Mireille’s path to data science began in biomedical research. She has an original background in Biomedical Sciences and a Master’s in Physiology from Stellenbosch University, where she worked on Covid-related research into blood clotting. She describes it as an intense and fascinating period (“working against the clock”) using microscopy to compare clotting patterns in healthy individuals versus Covid patients and exploring how inflammation and clot stability might contribute to severe outcomes.

From there, she transitioned into the data science space, drawn toward quantitative methods and larger-scale insights. “I felt a bit limited looking at small numbers of people,” she explains. That shift ultimately led her to a Master’s in Data Science at UCT, which she’s currently wrapping up. Her dissertation sits right at the intersection of public health and data science: analysing a programme designed to support stable patients by delivering medication in local communities instead of requiring long clinic visits. Mireille is using programme data to understand the risk factors associated with dropout, with the broader goal of improving retention and easing pressure on overstretched clinics.

What motivates her most now is the chance to do work that feels closer to real-world impact. Coming from lab science, she describes how research can sometimes feel far from the “end line”. At EPCON, she’s excited to be further down the pipeline, where data can support more immediate planning and, ultimately, better care.

Mireille is also candid about what makes public health data work difficult. Data can be incomplete, inconsistent, or outdated - and sometimes missing values may even be intentional. For her, the challenge isn’t only modelling: it’s being honest about what the data can and can’t support, and communicating results clearly enough that they’re actually usable. “If something is technically correct,” she notes, “but you can’t communicate it well to the person using it, then things end up on the cutting room floor.”

Looking ahead, Mireille hopes infectious-disease models become less isolated and more embedded into everyday public health workflows. She’s especially interested in approaches that combine multiple signals. For example, she potentially wants to integrate climate data with surveillance data. 

Outside of work (and studying), Mireille loves music concerts, long dinners with friends, and a good hike. Having grown up with farm life, she also values outdoor spaces and the reset they offer.

We’re thrilled to have Mireille on the team as she builds her institutional knowledge and continues bridging disciplines - bringing together biomedical insight, public health experience, and data science to support better decision-making where it matters most.