Dr. Lilian Wanzare

Dr. Lilian Wanzare is the Founder and Lead Researcher of the Maseno Centre for Applied Artificial Intelligence (MCAAI), which she established in early 2026 with a vision to bridge the gap between cutting-edge AI research and grassroots community impact across Africa.

Dr. Wanzare holds a PhD in Computational Linguistics with a specialisation in Natural Language Processing, and brings over 15 years of experience in African language technology to her role. Her scholarly contributions span low-resource language modelling, automatic speech recognition, and the design of ethical AI frameworks adapted to African institutional and cultural contexts. Her work has been recognised at leading venues including the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and AfricaML.

At MCAAI, Dr. Wanzare provides strategic leadership across all four research programmes, manages the centre's international partnerships, and champions the community-centred philosophy that defines MCAAI's approach to AI development. She is a principal investigator on the DhoNam speech corpus project, the African Next Voices initiative, and the AI Farm Assistant agricultural advisory platform.

Beyond her research, Dr. Wanzare is deeply committed to building Africa's next generation of AI researchers. She established MCAAI as both a research institution and a mentorship environment, ensuring that every postgraduate student and junior researcher at the centre receives the guidance, resources, and professional development opportunities needed to build lasting careers in AI.