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SHSPH Research Day 2024 Keynote Speaker

Incoming President of the South African Medical Research Council, Prof. Ntobeko Ntusi.

Professor Ntusi is the Head of Medicine and the Clinical Lead for Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance (CMR) and Cardiovascular Computed Tomography (CCT) at Groote Schuur Hospital and is appointed as a Cardiologist, Professor and Chair of Medicine in the Department of Medicine in the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of Cape Town (UCT).

His primary research interests comprise inflammatory heart disease (including HIV-associated cardiovascular disease), non-ischaemic cardiomyopathy and non-invasive imaging, in particular with CMR. He has in-depth training and expertise in CMR and CCT. Professor Ntusi has extensive experience with basic science, translational and clinical research. He currently supervises postgraduate students and is conducting several single-centre mechanistic clinical studies, which are mostly CMR-based. Through his research, Professor Ntusi has built strong links with colleagues in clinical cardiology, physics and biomedical engineering, tuberculosis and HIV medicine, rheumatology, immunology, molecular genetics, and biomedical statistics; and he has shown capacity for performance in scientific investigational teams and is suited to being part of multi-disciplinary and multi-centre clinical studies. The current application builds logically on his work on CMR in HIV-associated heart disease.

He obtained a BSc (Hons) degree in Cellular and Molecular Biology from Haverford College, USA, and an MBChB degree from UCT, before completing a fellowship in Internal Medicine through the Colleges of Medicine of South Africa. He served his internship and later worked as a community service medical officer and senior house officer at Frere Hospital in East London, South Africa. He read for a DPhil in Cardiovascular Medicine at the University of Oxford and completed his MD in Cardiology at UCT. He is a qualified cardiologist, through the Colleges of Medicine of South Africa.

He has been actively engaged and has contributed to improved understanding of cardiomyopathy, inflammatory heart disease and heart failure in South Africa and abroad.

Professor Ntusi is the holder of various awards and honours and has published widely. He will take office as the new President and CEO of the South African Medical Research Council (SAMRC) on 1 July 2024. He will join at the SHSPH Research Day on 26 June 2024 to discuss his vision for the SAMRC moving forward.