Chairperson

Prof Marietjie Venter obtained a PhD(Medical Virology)(Wits)(2003) on Respiratory Syncytial Virus and postdoctoral training at the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, USA (2003) on West Nile virus. She launched the Zoonotic arbo and Respiratory virus program (ZARV) in the department of Medical Virology in 2006. She held joint appointments with UP and the National Institute for Communicable diseases (NICD), as co-director, Centre for Respiratory diseases and Meningitis, and National Influenza Centre Director (2009-2014) and as One Health Program director, Global Disease Detection Centre, US-Centres of Disease Control and Prevention (US-CDC), South Africa (2014-2016). She is a Full Professor (Medical Virology) since 2012, and the co-founder, Centre for Viral Zoonoses, Department Medical Virology, where she heads the ZARV  full time since 2016. Her group does One Health syndromic and genomic surveillance for acute respiratory, febrile and neurological disease of unknown origin in humans, animals and vectors, developing novel diagnostics and investigate the molecular epidemiology respiratory viruses including COVID-19 and arboviruses viruses in Africa. She has >150 publications in this field with an H index of 48 and > 6000 scientific citations, ranked 12th by Research.com amongst Microbiology scientist in South Africa and 2392 globally. She won the National Science and Technology Forum (NSTF) award in (2013) for the best output by a senior scientist over 5-10y in South Africa and finalist for a lifetime achiever award in 2021. She is a member of the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf) (2021-).  She is advisor to the World Health Organization on surveillance of Influenza and respiratory syncytial virus, and the WHO Technical Advisory group for Arboviruses and the Chair of the WHO Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens, including COVID19 (SAGO). She is also the international One Health day contact for Africa and the Vice President for Africa for the World Society for Virology (2020-).

Panelists

Dr Candice Laverne Hendricks is a Paediatric Clinical Haematologist currently pursuing a PhD in Medical Immunology at the Institute for Cellular and Molecular Medicine at the University of Pretoria, South Africa as part of her vision of becoming a clinician-scientist. Her PhD work involves characterising umbilical cord blood haematopoietic stem cells from HIV exposed infants that are HIV negative at birth. Her life’s ambition is to provide more African and South African patients access to life-saving stem cell transplantations, with and without and gene therapies, in dedicated paediatric transplantation units. She believes this can be achieved by improving the number and diversity of South Africa’s stem cell donor population, improving clinical paediatric transplantation skills, increasing the academic, clinical and manufacturing capacity in the cell and gene therapy field and advocating for inclusivity of patients from both the public and private sectors to ensure all patients benefit equally.

Prof Veronica Ueckermann is an adjunct professor in the Department of Internal medicine and works in the division of infectious diseases.  Her research interest lies in infectious diseases and pandemic preparedness and focuses on HIV, Tuberculosis, COVID-19 and emerging respiratory diseases.  She is currently busy with a clinical research fellowship at Harvard University.

Prof Tahir Pillay is Chief Specialist, full Professor and Head of the Department of Chemical Pathology, University of Pretoria and National Health Laboratory service, Steve Biko Academic Hospital and head of the Division of Clinical Pathology and Clinical Pathology training programme in Pretoria, South Africa. He holds a B-rating with the NRF and he has held a number of leadership positions nationally and internationally.

He obtained a PhD in biochemistry from the University of Cambridge and completed his postgraduate specialist training at Hammersmith Hospital, Imperial College, London and postdoctoral training at the University of California San Diego. He is a Fellow of the Royal College of Pathologists and the College of Pathologists, South Africa.

 Prof Pillay’s research and extensive publications span the area of the molecular cell biology of insulin signalling and insulin resistance, molecular modelling of ligand-receptor complexes and development of new diagnostic probes for point-of-care testing using recombinant DNA technology. His principal research interests are focussed on the development of nanobodies for diagnostic laboratory testing and he is pioneering the application of nanobodies in the development of low cost diagnostic laboratory tests especially for noncommunicable diseases such as diabetes mellitus.

He is also the author/principal author of two acclaimed digital textbooks in laboratory medicine that have been released in 52 countries; “Practical Clinical Chemistry: core concepts” and “Interactive Mathematics for Laboratory Medicine”, for which he was previously nominated for the IFCC distinguished Education award. He is also a chapter author in the latest editions of the Tietz textbook of Clinical chemistry and Tietz fundamentals of clinical chemistry. He is extensively involved in teaching and training in chemical pathology and clinical chemistry in South Africa and has trained a substantial cohort of chemical pathologists (especially African) in South Africa.

Dr Iman van den Bout studied MSc in genetics at UP, he then moved to the Netherlands Cancer Institute for his PhD in cancer biology. At the time, microarray technology and shRNA technology had just been developed which he incorporated into his studies. During his postdoc years at the CRUK Manchester Cancer Institute, he studied the role of specialised lipids, called phosphoinositides, in cancer cell migration. At this point lentiviral delivery of shRNA as libraries had become available and they used this together with a newly developed high throughput migration assay to assess the effect of a library of genes on cell migration. Currently, he heads a cancer biology group with a focus on the role of hormone receptor GPCR proteins in breast cancer by using gene editing via CRISPR as well as advanced 3D cell culture models. Another large focus in their group is the development of tools for diagnosis and personalisation of treatment for African breast cancer patients. To this end, they are establishing a breast cancer organoid biobank as their test platform and they are testing a novel cancer diagnostic tool which uses ultra low pass whole genome sequencing to analyse cell free DNA isolated from blood to detect cancer specific DNA. Overall, their aim is to adapt new technologies to assist local cancer patients through improved diagnosis and treatment stratification.

Dr Tsakane Hlongwane is a specialist Obstetrician and gynaecologist from the University of Pretoria. She is an aspiring clinician scientist, working at Steve Biko Academic hospital and SAMRC-UP Maternal and Infant Health Care Strategies Unit. She has a special interest in maternal and perinatal health, and improving health systems.
Her current work focuses on screening low-risk pregnant women using a continuous-wave Doppler device- the Umbiflow^TM to identify the high-risk fetus in a low-risk mother, to improve the antenatal experience of care and prevent unexplained stillbirths.