Following 20 years of research in natural environmental governance and resource management, Suzi Malan completed a PhD in forest resource management at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver in 2015. Her focus was global environmental governance as observed in the transfrontier conservation areas of Southern Africa.  She has an interdisciplinary academic background in nature conservation, rural development and land use planning, with a pinch of agronomy thrown into the mix. Although Suzi has lived in 5 countries on 4 continents, she calls South Africa home, where she currently works for the COPC Research Unit as a project manager to support the implementation of COPC service in mine host communities.

Her role is to coordinate and facilitate the augmentation of community-oriented primary healthcare programmes in the mining communities. The focus of this implementation research work is on providing the necessary 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.

Before joining the COPC Research Unit, Suzi acted as resilience advisor to the Regional Inter-Agency Standing Committee (RIASCO), a forum of humanitarian and development UN agencies, NGOs and donor agencies, to provide support in establishing a resilience programme in the Southern African Region. In addition to these positions, over the past decade, Suzi has been a part-time associate of the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) as technical report writer and team leader of the Earth Negotiations Bulletin, as well as reporting on other environmental conferences and meetings. In this capacity, she regularly attends meetings of UN bodies on development, climate change, water and water-related ecosystems, biodiversity, endangered species, renewable energy, desertification and forest resource management.