Nicki Tiffin is a molecular geneticist, computational biologist, epidemiologist, and health data wizard. But above all, she is a problem fixer.

"I'm not interested in thinking about what we ought to be doing. I'm interested in building a tool that makes the solution happen," said Nicki, a professor at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa.

The tool she has developed addresses one of the oldest inequities that disadvantages African researchers: Sharing data with researchers outside the continent.

For decades, it's been best practice for researchers to upload their data and samples to a public repository for all to use. The problem: African researchers are usually the ones who spend years collecting the samples, and once they make the data public, researchers in high-income countries have the resources to comb through the data and publish papers faster, even though they lack a full appreciation of the local context. This hurts the quality of the analyses and the career prospects of African researchers.

"Africans have less advocacy to push back because of the inequitable funding setup. The data sharing tool I am developing is an attempt to shift that dynamic and get a better outcome for Africans in general," said Nicki.

Nicki has built the African Data and Biospecimen Exchange, an online platform that will give African researchers a stronger voice in how research using their data is performed and greater control over the future use of those resources.

The platform is similar to a free advertising arena. Researchers can post information about their datasets and biospecimen collections without having to share them outright or send them to a centralized repository. Interested parties can then initiate a negotiation on how the data would be used. For instance, in exchange for the data or biospecimens, African researchers could request the other party share bylines on published papers, include them on the team doing the analysis, or furnish new equipment for the health clinic that collected the samples.

More recently, through the Calestous Juma Fellowship, Nicki developed a new product called the Data Sharing License, by ADBEx that empowers data holders around the world. The tool allows users to create licenses that specify the terms and conditions of how their data is used by others.

Both tools aim to promote more ethical sharing practices that put African researchers, global data and biospecimen generators, and end-users on equal footing. Nicki believes more equitable data sharing can lead to a virtuous cycle of benefits. African populations will benefit from better-informed research using their data and biospecimens, while increased collaboration and improved career development could curb the brain drain of African researchers moving overseas.