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 worked on respiratory- and zoonotic arboviruses since 1999, as medical scientist at the National Institute for Communicable diseases (NICD), and University of Pretoria (2006-). She was co-director, Centre for Respiratory diseases and Meningitis, NICD and National Influenza Centre Director, 2009-2014. From 2014-2016, One Health Program director, Global Disease Detection Centre, US-Centres of Disease Control and Prevention (US-CDC), South Africa. She is Full Professor (Medical Virology) since 2016, heading the Zoonotic arbo & respiratory virus program and co-founder, Centre for Viral Zoonoses, Department Medical Virology, University of Pretoria. Her group does One Health syndromic surveillance for acute respiratory, febrile and neurological disease of unknown origin in humans and animals and vectors and investigate the molecular epidemiology and genomics of respiratory viruses including COVID-19 and arboviruses viruses in Africa. She has >130 publications in this field with an H index of 48 and > 6000 scientific citations. 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. 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-).
Sarah Downs (Senior research assistant)
Sarah holds a BSc(Hons) in Biology (University of KwaZulu-Natal) and was awarded best Southern African Zoology Final Year Student. She attained an MSc in Molecular Biology/Phylogeny of rodents (also UKZN) and worked as the DNA analyst within the SADC ECORat project. This work centred on DNA Barcoding (short targeted sequencing) to identify rodent species and their potential for causing disease outbreaks. Sarah continued in infectious diseases as a junior medical scientist involved in hospital-based surveillance projects for RSV, Influenza, Rhinovirus, hMPV, Whooping Cough and Group B Streptococcus. Sarah progressed to a PhD that involved the design of a high-throughput PCR for pneumococcal serotyping and bacterial species detection in respiratory samples, including capsular targets described in literature as “thermodynamically improbable”. This also involved field enrolments in rural and urban communities, of children under 5-years-of-age and their care-givers. Sarah served as a reference group member for a novel project for water-based COVID-19 Epidemiology surveillance for Non-Sewered Communities. Sarah was selected as one of 35 high-performing graduate students (worldwide) to participate in the Gates Notes Deep Dive event on Pandemic Prevention, with Bill Gates and subject matter experts.
Email: [email protected]
Caitlin finished her MSc degree in 2021 in the ZARV group and has now been appointed as a senior research assistant. She will participate in the ZARV's research and surveillance projects and be responsible for supporting the One Health genomic surveillance for Covid19, human and discovery aspects of the project. She will also be trained to oversee the iSeq instrument in the lab.
Email: [email protected]
Kgothatso completed her MSc degree in 2021 under Prof Venter's supervision and has now been appointed as senior research assistant. She will be responsible for assisting the ZARV group with lab admin and research support. She will be working on febrile diseases of unknown origin project as part of the African network for improved diagnostics and epidemiology in collaboration with the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin
Email: [email protected]
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