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.

Panelists

Prof Lekan Ayo-Yusuf is currently the Head of the School of Health Systems and Public Health at the University of Pretoria, previously he served as the Deputy Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation at Sefako Makgatho Health Sciences University. His main research focus is on behavioural epidemiology and related policy evaluation for non-communicable diseases (NCD) prevention and health promotion. In particular, he has been an investigator and/or co-investigator on national and international research, including clinical trials and capacity-building projects related to tobacco use prevention, treatment/cessation and policy.

He is also working on resilience studies having previously directed the USAID-funded transdisciplinary Southern Africa resilience innovation programme (SARiLab) as part of the ResilientAfrica Network (RAN), made up of 20 African Universities and three US partner Universities. The programme allows for the development of innovative interventions including technologies that can strengthen health systems and community disaster resilience.    

Prof Ayo-Yusuf serves as a member of the editorial board of a number of international journals and as a member of a number of national and international scientific committees/groups including current role as the Deputy Chair of the Standing committee on Health of the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf), a member of the WHO Tobacco Regulation Scientific Group and Chair of Gauteng Provincial Health Research Committee.

Prof Jannie Hugo is the Director of the UP COPC Research Unit.  He is leading the academic development and implementation of Community Oriented Primary Care (COPC) including mobile data systems and  the implementation of a Community Oriented Substance Use Programme (COSUP) in collaboration with the City of Tshwane and  Gauteng DOH.  

In collaboration with Anglo American his team is implementing integrated health and development solutions in many mining communities living next to 24 mines. This work is done with the Impact Catalyst lead by the CSIR. He leads the UP team in developing two population surveillance sites as part of the  GRT-INSPIRE SAPRIN node in Gauteng. 

Jannie received several awards in education innovation (2009, 2012) form UP, Higher Education Learning and Teaching Association of SA (HELTASA) National Teachers Award(2013), a lifetime award for innovation, research and service  by the South African Medical Association (2018)  and the UP Health Sciences award on Community Engagement(2020). 

Jannie trained at UFS and practiced primary care in Qwa-Qwa in the Free State from 1984 to 1988, before moving to Medunsa, and subsequently University of Pretoria in 2006 where he retired as head of Family Medicine in January 2021.

Prof Pierre Ongolo-Zogo is the founding director since 2008 of the Centre for Development of Best Practices in Health (CDBPH) that hosts Cochrane Cameroon and promotes evidence-informed health decision-making in Africa. Pierre has been an advocate of evidence informed health decision making for the last 18 years contributing to several initiatives such as the WHO-led EVIPNet and the EU funded SURE project.

Pierre’s research activities comprise health policy and systems research related to governance, financing, immunization, knowledge translation, non communicable diseases, mHealth and quality improvement. Pierre graduated as MD from Université de Nancy, as clinical radiologist and MSc in Biomedical engineering from Université Claude Bernard Lyon-France and completed his PhD in Health Policy at Makerere University Kampala, Uganda.

Ms Candice Herd is currently pursuing her PhD at the Institute for Cellular and Molecular Medicine, entitled " Anti-HIV lentivector transduction of haematopoeitic stem, progenitor, and T-cells". She is passionate about cell and gene therapies, and hopes to help make these treatments accessible to all South Africans.