Guest and Workshop Speakers

Mental Health Interactive workshop

Personalised Healthcare Interactive workshop

Prof Kitty Uys is an occupational therapist and also specializes in augmentative and alternative communication. Her research focus is on the outcomes that accommodation and adaptation are providing individuals with severe and multiple disabilities to participate in their occupations. Working with families of people with disabilities led to the realisation of gaps in the education and health care systems that hinders sustainable rehabilitation. Therefore, transdisciplinary training and interprofessional education and practice inform her teaching pedagogy.

She is currently the head of the Department of Occupational Therapy at the University of Pretoria.

Open Access Q&A session

Chairperson

Speakers

Prof Michael Pepper is Director of the Institute for Cellular and Molecular Medicine, Director of the South African Medical Research Council Extramural Unit for Stem Cell Research and Therapy, and a Research Professor in the Department of Immunology in the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of Pretoria. He is also professeur associé in the Department of Genetic Medicine and Development in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Geneva, Switzerland.

Michael obtained his MBChB in 1982 from the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Cape Town, and moved to Geneva in 1986, where he obtained his PhD in 1990, MD in 1992 and Privat Docent in 1997. He returned to South Africa in July 2004. Michael maintains research and teaching commitments in Pretoria and Geneva.

Michael has worked extensively in the field of clinically-oriented (translational) molecular cell biology and has made seminal contributions to understanding the mechanisms of angiogenesis and lymphangiogenesis. His current scientific interests are in the fields of cell and gene therapy and genetic susceptibility to disease, as well as the ethical, legal and social implications (ELSI) of work in these fields.

Michael led a consensus study for the Academy of Science of South Africa entitled “Human Genetics and Genomics in South Africa: Ethical, Legal and Social Implicaions” which was launched in December 2018, and is currently leading a project on the ELSI of gene therapy (including gene editing) in South Africa. He has also been working with the Department of Health on legislation pertaining to Chapter 8 of the National Health Act and regulations thereto since mid-2009. Michael is immediate past-President and Chairman of the Board of the South African Tissue Bank Association, and was previously a member of the National Advisory Committee on Innovation which advises the Minister of Science and Technology.

Michael has more than 320 medical and scientific publications with and H-Index of 73/87 (Scopus/Google Scholar). He is a member of the Academy of Science of South Africa and has received a number of awards for his research including the South African Health Excellence Award for Scientific Excellence in 2019. Michael has been extensively involved in teaching at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, and has lectured widely on the international circuit. He interacts frequently with the media and writes for the lay press on scientific and medical matters.

Ms Joy Owango is an experienced   award winning Founding Director of the Training Centre in Communication (TCC Africa) an award winning Trust registered in Kenya set up in 2006 and is the first African-based training centre to teach effective communication skills to scientists. TCC Africa is in partnership with the University of Nairobi, Kenya and provides capacity support in improving African researchers output and visibility through training in scholarly and science communication.

She has a demonstrated history of working in higher education (in both in private, university and   non-governmental sector).  She was a successful higher education practitioner with Clarivate Analytics and worked with the following Governments, Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Mauritius, Ghana, Senegal, Burkina Faso and created foundational opportunities valued at approximately USD 1.3Million. As the   Director of TCC Africa she is currently working with all 15 African countries that have committed to spending 1% of their GDP in Higher Education and Research and Development.  Beyond this  I have successfully created  Global North –South collaborations, where , our centre is  providing equitable access to open source  research discovery solutions to African  governments and  their respective academic communities. In addition to this, she sits on the board of AfricArxiv,  Africa’s  only preprint repository and as a project partner we support African researchers and  institutes on how they can improve their  data output, sovereignty  and visibility through effective use of preprints and personal identifiers.  As a centre we launched TCC Africa thought leadership research capacity webinars, where we created a platform for African researchers to access various aspects of the research life cycle and #openscience in Africa through various collaborations North-South collaborations. These webinars  are hosted live on Facebook and have garnered  over 20,000 views and  been liked  over 1000 times   and the subsequent  announcements  on Facebook, Twitter  and Linkedin  have received  over  10,000 cumulative likes. The webinars are equally indexed in AfricArxiv and can be cited as resources. She currently sit on the Steering Committee of the International Science Council’s, Steering Group on the Project on the future of scientific publishing.

Her latest achievement in higher education and research capacity in Africa was recognized by The Organization of Women in Science for the Developing World by UNESCO during the 2021 International Day for Women in Science https://twitter.com/JoyOwango/status/1361208739907461120 .

Ms Veliswa Tshetsha recently joined the University of Pretoria as a senior coordinator for open scholarship. Her specific focus areas include Open Access, open data, Research Data Management (RDM), Data Management Plan and Tools, research(er) visibility and impact, researcher tools, repository management and metadata Issues, and research impact services. 

Previously, she held a number of library positions in the western Cape, Cape Town at Planning Partners, Unisa on a part-time basis as a branch librarian and full-time positions at UWC, then cross over to CPUT as a faculty librarian, branch manager, senior librarian, and later as a scholarly communications librarian providing research support services across faculties, research units, centres, institutes, and schools.