Dr Saiendhra Moodley is a public health medicine specialist. He is currently a Senior Lecturer in the Division of Behaviour and Health Management Sciences, School of Health Systems and Public Health at the University of Pretoria. He has a broad range of public health experience and has worked at the Office of Health Standards Compliance,  in the Department of Public Health Medicine at Steve Biko Academic Hospital/University of Pretoria, and in the Provincial Department of Health in the Western Cape. He has previously served as Vice-President and President of the Public Health Association of South Africa. He is the current President of the College of Public Health Medicine. His research interests are public mental health and human resources for health.

Panelists

Prof Flavia Senkubuge is a medical doctor, Public Health Medicine specialist and global public health advocate.   Prof Senkubuge is the Deputy Dean Stakeholders at the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. She is also the President of the Colleges of Medicine South Africa (CMSA). The CMSA is the apex body of medicine in South Africa and one of the most prestigious bodies of medicine on the African continent.

She is the current chair of the WHO/Afro region African Advisory Council on Research and Development (AACHRD), concerned with advising the WHO/Afro regional director on matters concerning health research and development in Africa. She is the president of Women in Global Health (WGH) South Africa. WGH is a global movement with chapters across the globe and is concerned with achieving gender equality within global health leadership. She is the Vice-President of the African Federation of Public Health Association (AFPHA), an organisation concerned with advocating and promoting public health in Africa. At heart she is a philanthropist and is passionate about mentoring the next generation of leaders.

Dr Suzi Malan has 20 years of research experience in natural environmental governance and resource management and completed her PhD in forest resource management at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver in 2015. Her focus is global environmental governance, as observed in the transfrontier conservation areas of Southern Africa.  She has an inter-disciplinary academic background in nature conservation, rural development, land use planning as well as agronomy.  Suzi has lived in 5 countries on four continents, however, still recognizes South Africa as home. She currently works for the COPC Research Unit as a project manager. Her role is coordinating and facilitating the augmentation of community-oriented primary healthcare programmes in the mining communities.  In addition to supporting the implementation of COPC service in mine host communities, they focus on providing training support to Department of Health community health workers, ensuring multi-disciplinary teamwork and care coordination across all levels of healthcare, strengthening the role of existing social networks such as churches and NGOs, and ensuring proper monitoring and evaluation of these programmes.

Dr Yogan Pillay is the director of the Clinton Health Access Initiative in South Africa Since June 2020. Between 2008 to 2020 he was the Deputy Director-General for health programmes in the national Department of Health. Prior to his appointment as DDG he held the positions of chief director for strategic planning and director for the district health system – all in the National Department of Health. He holds a Phd in public health from Johns Hopkins University.

He has authored and co-authored more than 60 peer reviewed journal articles and has co-authored two textbooks (The Textbook of International Health, 2009; The Textbook of Global Health, 2017).  He has been a member of the Scientific and Technical Advisory committees for TB and HIV of the WHO. He co-chaired the HIV treatment guidelines committee of the WHO in 2015/16. He served as a member of the Boards of AMREF (SA), the Health Systems Trust, the BIOVAC Institute, and the National Health Laboratory Service. He is currently a member of the board of trustees of the South African National AIDS Council and the board of the Council for Medical Schemes of South Africa. In addition, he serves on the scientific advisory boards of UNAIDS and the TB Alliance.

He has been a member of the ministerial committee on National Health Insurance and continues to lead the national effort to develop service benefits for various levels of care. In 2018 he was awarded the Karel Styblo Medallion and presented with a certification of appreciation for leadership in the global fight against tuberculosis by KNCV.

Prof Lucy Gilson is a health policy and systems researcher engaged in innovative, applied and interdisciplinary work. Her recent areas of work include conceptual and empirical work on health systems resilience, health system governance and leadership, and she has a long-standing interest in politics of health policy change and implementation. These are also some of the areas of her post-graduate educational work. She Professor and Head of the Health Policy and Systems Division in the UCT School of Public Health and hold a joint appointment with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), UK.