Biography
Francesca Mnenula is from Lilongwe, Malawi, and graduated from St. Lawrence University, New York, in May 2026 with a Bachelor of Science in Data Science Honors and Economics. She is currently a Data Science Assistant with the World Bank Group’s Corporate Finance Unit in Washington, DC, where she supports financial modelling and data analytics. An alumna of United World College (UWC) East Africa in Tanzania, Francesca is interested in applying data science to development challenges in Malawi, particularly in agriculture. Her honors thesis explored how machine learning and image-based methods could be used to estimate wind patterns from grass orientation, contributing to research on how traditional ecological knowledge can be adapted in the context of environmental change in Savoonga, Alaska.
Francesca has received awards including the Charbern Outstanding Junior Economics Scholarship and the Davis United World College Scholarship, and was elected to the Phi Beta Kappa Honor Society.
Francesca is active with the United World College Malawi National Committee, supporting access to UWC educational opportunities for Malawian students. Outside of her academic and professional work, she enjoys photography and videography and documenting the people and places around her.
Francesca hopes to pursue graduate study in Statistical Science and Social Data Science at Oxford.