Dr Aunkh H Chabalala

Dr Aunkh H Chabalala is the current National Director of the Indigenous Knowledge-Based Technology Innovation Unit of the South African Department of Science and Innovation. He is a medical scientist with a special interest in research, development and innovation in African natural medicines, cosmeceuticals, nutraceuticals, health infusions and technology transfer for socio-economic development. He is an applied epidemiologist and African medicine practitioner with a passion for ancient but scientific African and Afro-Asian healing arts.

He holds an MSc (University of Pretoria), Master of Public Health (Tsinghua University) and PhD in Technology Innovation (Da Vinci Institute of Technology). His special interest is in systematisation and interfacing of ancient yet global knowledge systems with emerging sciences, e.g. quantum mechanics, pharmacology, epigenetics, biotechnology, astrophysics, etc. He serves on the South African Health Products Regulatory Authority (SAHPRA) and the Ministerial Advisory and Presidential Master-Plan Committees on Medical Cannabis. He formerly worked as Deputy Director and Medical Scientist heading the Emerging and Re-Emerging Infectious Diseases Unit of the National Department of Health. He was also the World Health Organization Focal Point for Integrated Disease Surveillance and Response in South Africa.

Prof. Nceba Gqaleni

Prof. Nceba Gqaleni is a researcher at the Africa Health Research Institute. He trained as a biochemist at the former University of Natal and obtained his doctorate at the University of Strathclyde in Scotland in 1996. He is a National Research Foundation (NRF) rated researcher with an interest in immunology, infectious and non-infectious diseases and traditional medicine, and has served on the Interim Traditional Health Practitioners Council of South Africa.

In 2007 Prof. Gqaleni was appointed Chair of Indigenous Health Care Systems Research, a prestigious programme funded by the Department of Science and Innovation (DSI) and administered by the NRF. He has also served in various positions at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, including Director of the Doris Duke Medical Research Institute, Deputy Dean and Director of the Centre for Occupational and Environmental Health.

He has served on various national and international bodies, including the Presidential Task Team on African Traditional Medicine, Chairperson of the IKS Bioprospecting and Product Development Platform of the DSI, Deputy Chairperson of the KwaZulu-Natal Provincial Council on AIDS, and has been a member of the WHO (African Regional Office) expert committee on Traditional Medicine.

Currently, Prof. Gqaleni is a Researcher at the Africa Health Research Institute, a member of the task team drafting South Africa's Policy on African Traditional Medicine, project leader of the KwaZulu-Natal IK-Based Healthy Lifestyle Strategy to fight COVID-19 and beyond, and member of the WHO Regional Expert Committee on Traditional Medicine for COVID-19.

Prof. Priscilla Reddy

Prof. Priscilla Reddy is a behavioural science and health promotion specialist, and is currently the Strategic Lead: Health and Wellbeing in the Human and Social Capabilities Programme within the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC). She was formerly Director of the Health Promotion Research and Development Unit of the South African Medical Research Council (SAMRC). In her 28-year research career, Prof. Reddy has conducted research as a principal investigator across various research areas.

Recently, she led the HSRC's rapid response assessments of the impact of COVID‑19 on South Africa and the attitudes and responses of the public to the lockdown.  Given the high incidence of COVID-19 infections among health workers in South Africa and globally, a concurrent survey examining the impact of COVID-19 on health workers was also conducted.  It explored the crucial issues impacting on these frontline workers with a view to ensuring their ability to serve the country. The results of these surveys were presented to the President and members of Cabinet as well as the National Coronavirus Command Council (NCCC).

Prof. Reddy is well known for designing the South African Youth Risk Behaviour Survey, which was conducted in 2002, 2008 and 2011, together with the Global Youth Tobacco Survey. She has conducted rigorous research in the fields of health promotion and behavioural science, including the Post-Apartheid Prison Health Issues Survey and the Tobacco Control and Prevention in South Africa Survey. Most recently, she was the principal investigator for the TeenMom Connect Grant survey funded by MRC UK. This was an adaptation of MomConnect, a South African Department of Health initiative that supports maternal health through the use of cellphone-based technologies integrated into maternal and child health services.

Prof. Reddy has served on academic boards both nationally and internationally. She has promoted 15 PhD graduates through Maastricht University – academics who now provide much-needed research expertise to the African public health sector. In her work she embodies the mission of the HSRC of using high-quality research to generate knowledge that can be used to reduce poverty and inequality and improve the quality of life of all South Africans.

Prof. Tulio de Oliveira

Prof. Tulio de Oliveira moved to South Africa in 1997 as his mother returned to Mozambique to help reconstruct the country after the civil war. He completed his PhD at the Nelson Mandela School of Medicine at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) and took a position as research fellow at Oxford University in the UK. He founded the Kwazulu-Natal Research Innovation and Sequencing Platform (KRISP) at UKZN in 2017. He is a full professor at UKZN and Associate Professor at the University of Washington, USA.

Dr Kobus Herbst

Dr Kobus Herbst is the Director of the South African Population Research Infrastructure Network (SAPRIN). SAPRIN is funded by the Department of Science and Innovation and hosted by the South African Medical Research Council. It conducts population and health surveillance in five provinces, soon to be expanded to two more provinces.

He is a faculty member at the Africa Health Research Institute (AHRI), where he is the principal investigator of the Population Intervention Programme, in addition to his duties as Chief Information Officer. He is honorary associate professor at the School of Public Health at the University of the Witwatersrand and an honorary professor at the University of Limpopo.

Dr Herbst graduated as a medical doctor from the University of Pretoria in 1979, completed a master's in bioengineering at the University of Cape Town, and registered as a public health physician in 1994 following a registrarship at Medunsa.

He is passionate about how information management contributes to the scientific process, in particular the establishment of data repositories to curate datasets and promote the secondary use of research data. To this end, in 2013 he established the INDEPTH data repository, which contains longitudinal demographic and cause-specific mortality data of more than 3 million individuals from 25 demographic surveillance sites in lower and middle-income countries. This work is being extended in a collaborative project to establish a repository of longitudinal population-based HIV sero-surveillance data from 10 sites in Africa.

Prof. Derrick Swartz

Prof. Swartz serves as Special Advisor to South Africa's Minister of Higher Education, Science and Innovation, and is the Chief Strategy Officer for Ocean Sciences at Nelson Mandela University (NMU). Since the 1990s, he has been a key figure in South Africa's post-apartheid higher education system, having served as Vice-Chancellor of NMU (2008 to 2017) and Rector of the University of Fort Hare (1999 to 2007). In 2005, under his leadership, the University of Fort Hare was awarded the Supreme Order of Boabab (Gold Class) by then President Thabo Mbeki in recognition of its distinguished service in higher education and leadership development.

Prof. Swartz holds master's and DPhil degrees in sociology of development from Essex University. In 2008, he received an honorary doctorate (human rights law) from Essex University. During the pre-democracy years, he was a leading anti-apartheid activist and went into exile for a decade before returning to South Africa in 1995. Since then, he has devoted his energies to higher education, particularly, the role of science and innovation in sustainable economic development.

He served as Chair of the National Council on Innovation in SA as well as numerous non-profit boards, and in 2015 pioneered the establishment of South Africa's only dedicated ocean sciences university campus at NMU, to promote greater scientific and public understanding of the human impact on our oceans, its centrality to the future of life on the planet, scientific scholarship, technology innovation and graduate training in ocean sciences in SA.

Prof. Sarah Mosoetsa

Prof. Sarah Mosoetsa is an associate professor of sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand and Chief Executive Officer at the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences.  She currently serves on a range of governing and advisory panels, including the University of Venda's council, the board of the National Research Foundation, the Department of Employment and Labour's Minimum Wage Commission, the Southern Centre for Inequality Studies' advisory panel, and the Global Labour University's committee, South Africa. She has worked for several organisations, including the Society, Work and Development Institute, the Human Sciences Research Council and the Development Bank of Southern Africa.

Since completing her PhD at Wits University in 2005, Prof. Mosoetsa has published locally and internationally.  She is the author of "Eating from one pot: Dynamics of Survival in poor South African households" (Wits Press, 2011) and co-editor of "Labour in the Global South: challenges and alternatives for workers" (ILO, 2012). Her recent collaborative projects include "Precarious Labor in Global Perspective, International Labor and Working-class History" (Cambridge University Press, 2017), "New South African Review 6 - The Crisis of Inequality" (Wits Press 2018), and more recently, "Poverty and Inequality in South Africa" (Transformation: Critical Perspectives on Southern Africa, 2019).

Prof. Mosoetsa is currently leading a COVID-19 in townships study on the socio-economic and political impact and implications of the pandemic in South Africa.  Her research interests include labour studies, unemployment, inequality, and household dynamics.