SHARE Profile: Mercury Shitindo

What is your role in the SHARE project?

I am the Country Principal Investigator for the Kenya component of the SHARE project. My role focuses on leading the qualitative research activities in Kenya, including stakeholder interviews, workshops, and cross-country analysis exploring the ethical, social, and practical dimensions of environmentally sustainable health research.

I work closely with local partners to ensure that the tools and approaches explored within SHARE are meaningfully adapted to African research contexts. I also contribute to the project's ethical and governance work, helping to ensure that our research processes and outputs are context-sensitive, equitable, and grounded in real-world research practices.

What brought you to SHARE? 

My work sits at the intersection of bioethics, global health, and research governance. Over the past decade, I have worked on ethical frameworks for data-driven health research, digital health, and global research partnerships, with a particular focus on equity and responsible innovation in low- and middle-income countries.

In recent years, my research has increasingly focused on the environmental sustainability of health research and the ethical responsibilities of research institutions in the face of climate change. I have been involved in projects exploring the environmental impact of data-driven health research and co-developing ethical frameworks to guide sustainable research practices in African contexts.

SHARE brings together many of these interests, offering an opportunity to collaboratively explore how sustainability tools can be understood, adapted, and ethically embedded in diverse research environments.

What do you bring to the SHARE project?  

I bring expertise in research ethics, qualitative research, and capacity strengthening in global health research systems. My work often focuses on how global research initiatives can be translated into locally meaningful and practical approaches, particularly within African research environments.

Within SHARE, I contribute a strong focus on ethics, equity, and context. This includes examining how sustainability tools interact with local research infrastructures, resource constraints, and institutional priorities, and how these tools can be adapted in ways that are fair, feasible, and socially responsible.

I also bring experience in participatory and co-creation approaches, which are central to ensuring that the voices and experiences of researchers in diverse settings shape the project's outputs.

What excites you about this project? 

What excites me most about SHARE is its collaborative and reflective approach. The project creates space for researchers from different disciplines and regions to learn from each other and to think critically about how environmental sustainability can be meaningfully integrated into health research.

I am particularly excited about the opportunity to co-develop practical resources that are not only theoretically robust but also usable and relevant in diverse research contexts. SHARE offers a unique opportunity to bring ethical reflection, empirical research, and practical tool development together in a way that can shape the future of sustainable health research globally.