Dr Blessings Kapumba is a Malawian social scientist and empirical bioethicist working at the intersection of bioethics, global health, and community engagement in resource-constrained settings.

He is a recipient of a Fogarty African Bioethics Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics and a GHBN Postdoctoral Research Associate (Bioethics) at the Malawi-Liverpool-Wellcome Programme, within the Community Engagement and Bioethics Research Group.

His scholarship spans the ethics of ancillary care in the Global South, controlled human infection studies, human genomics research, and emerging malaria vector-control technologies. He has published in international bioethics journals; full publication can be accessed here .

Central to his current scholarship is a deepening interest in deliberative methods for community engagement on emerging health technologies. He is advancing the use of approaches such as Citizens’ panel, advisory parliaments, and stakeholder dialogues to surface community-defined priorities and ethical safeguards in the governance of novel biotechnologies, including malaria genetic biocontrol, novel vaccine platforms, and artificial intelligence in health. He champions transformative, relationally just engagement that positions African communities as legitimate co-creators, rather than passive recipients, of frontier health innovation.