An old adage that goes, “a journey of a thousand miles, begins with a single step”, resonates with Dr Nasheeta Peer. What she simply recalls as being a fortuitous viewing of a vacancy advertisement by the South African Medical Research Council back in 2004 and applying for it, led her to the world of research and unlocked her potential as a scientist.

At the time, the organisation was looking to appoint a clinician to conduct cardiovascular disease research, but fast forward from that day, she has a different story to tell – she describes the past 18 years that she has spent at the SAMRC to be the most fulfilling of her career.

But who is Dr Peer?
A NRF C1 rated scientist, Dr Peer is a Senior Specialist Scientist within the Non-Communicable Diseases Research Unit of the SAMRC and conducts research on non-communicable diseases epidemiology focusing on Cardiovascular and cardiometabolic diseases. Her area of expertise includes Diabetes, hypertension, dyslipidaemia, obesity and tobacco smoking.

But that is not all there is to this – she is also Associate Professor at the Department of Medicine, Faculty of Health sciences, University of Cape Town (UCT); an Associate Editor for the: BMC Public Health, as well as the Academic Editor for the: PLOS Global Public Health.

Her immeasurable contribution to research has led to a number of accolades under her name – including the recipient of the best publication in diabetes award presented by the Society for Endocrinology, Metabolism and Diabetes of South Africa (SEMDSA) in 2013 and 2015; and an award in the International Society of Hypertension (ISH) New Investigator Oral Presentation category in 2021. Even with her busy schedule, she managed to receive distinctions for her MPH and MBA dissertations – talk about a bookworm of note!

Speaking of being a bookworm, Dr Peer’s qualifications include:

• MBChB: University of Natal
• MBA (Master of Business Administration): University of Cape Town
• MPH (Master’s in Public Health): University of Cape Town
• PhD (Doctorate in Medicine): University of Cape Town

Professor Marlo Möller is a Research Scientists, Professor and Head of the TB Host Genetics Group within the Division of Molecular Biology & Human Genetics at Stellenbosch University.

Her primary research focus is on finding the human genetic underpinnings of infectious diseases, especially tuberculosis (TB). Major research topics include:

• common genetic variants that predispose the general population to pulmonary TB;
• individuals that display extreme forms of TB resistance and susceptibility, specifically “resisters”, tuberculous meningitis and Primary Immunodeficiencies;
• human population genetics;
• animal genetics
• as well as functional studies in these contexts.

Other scientific interests include the development of genetic resources, such as reference genomes and allele frequency databases, for Southern African populations. 

Over the years, the National Research Foundation (NRF) C3 Rated Researcher has won several awards, including the National Research Foundation Research Career Award; the Stellenbosch University Rector’s award for general performance and the South African Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Award: Best National Honours Student.

Her qualifications include a PhD in Medical Biochemistry; BSc Hons in Medical Biochemistry (cum laude); BSc in Molecular and Cellular Biology. She also completed a Programme for the development of leadership and team skills (NQF level 5).

She says her relationship with the SAMRC is a longstanding one dating from her postgraduate studies. Professor attributes her successful research, in part, to the SAMRC, saying that without the bursaries she received from the SAMRC, she would not have been able to complete her degrees. She is currently a member of the SAMRC Centre for Tuberculosis Research.

If “Perseverance is the mother of success” was a person, then Professor Rabia Johnson would probably be that person.

Having joined the South African Medical Research Council in 2009 as a Junior Scientist, it has become very clear that Professor Johnson does not work for recognition but conducts work that is worthy of recognition. It is with this mindset that she has been able to grow in leaps and bounds through the ranks of the organisation while also positioning herself as an established researcher in the field of non-communicable diseases.

Today she is a NRF C2 rated scientist who holds a PhD degree as well as a BA Honours degree in Business Management and occupies the position Co-Deputy Director at Biomedical Research and Innovation Platform (BRIP). In addition to her undoubtable hard work and dedication, she also attributes this achievement to the SAMRC’s Accelerated Development Program whose primary objective is to develop targeted employees to be competent in their current positions and to prepare them for future leadership positions as Unit Directors, support/business leaders and/or Division Managers or Executive Directors of SAMRC Divisions.

Professor Johnson leads the Cardiometabolism Group within BRIP/SAMRC. Despite having a plethora of treatment options available, diabetes and hypertension continue to be the leading cause of cardiovascular-related deaths worldwide. Hence, her research group focuses on understanding and delineating insults such as Doxorubicin-induced toxicity, diabetes and hypertension effects on the cardiovascular system.

As a molecular biologist, she uses molecular mechanisms to elucidate pathophysiological mechanisms activated during the progression of diabetes-induced cardiovascular function, side effects induced by pharmacological treatment, including Dox-induced cardiotoxicity and the role pharmacogenomics plays in hypertension treatment failure.

Understanding disease physiology will unravel novel biomarkers capable of predicting disease risk and investigating the therapeutic potential of indigenous plant extracts against these conditions.​ This is especially important in the African population with its resource-constrained settings.

Also, using her molecular background, Prof Johnson was instrumental in the SAMRC COVID-19 wastewater surveillance program, where she was able to detect, quantify and identify variants of concern circulating within the community. She was also, involved in the expansion of the molecular programme nationwide to other institutions and research centers.

For a workaholic she is, it is no surprise that her name sends echoes of vibrations within scientific corridors and that she holds various other positions outside of the SAMRC, including Associate Professor within the Division of Medical Physiology, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, Tygerberg Campus, Stellenbosch University. 

In order to advance her work, she has received various research grants, including the NRF Competitive Support for Rated Researchers, NRF Thuthuka Award, SAMRC Early Career Fellowship, Department of Science and Innovation (DSI) Pharmacogenomics in Precision Medicine and the South African Rooibos Council (SARC) funding. Furthermore, the SARC acknowledged her role in science and paid tribute to her invaluable contribution to the rooibos research.

Passionate about capacity development, Prof Johnson has over the last decade, effectively transferred knowledge which contribute to scientific and professional development of young researchers under her supervision.

Prof Grant Theron is a Professor of Molecular Biology and Human Genetics in the Division of Molecular Biology and Human Genetics, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, Stellenbosch University. He is also a member of the DST/NRF Centre for Excellence in Tuberculosis Research and the South Africa Medical Research Council’s Centre for Tuberculosis Research, both of which are embedded within Stellenbosch University.

His core research interests are the design and field evaluation of improved diagnostics for tuberculosis and drug resistance, the transmission and aerobiology of tuberculosis, including drug-resistant tuberculosis, and most recently the microbiome in the context of tuberculosis.Prof Theron has a record of accomplishment of recruiting tuberculosis patients in Africa for high impact clinical trials.

He has led several projects on tuberculosis diagnostics, which have measured their impact on long-term patient outcomes. He has held a Training Fellowship in Public Health and Tropical Medicine from the Wellcome Trust, he is a European and Developing Countries Clinical Trial Partnership (EDCTP) Senior Fellow and holds a Newton Advanced Fellowship from the British Royal Society.

In a relatively short period, he has published approximately 60 papers in international peer-reviewed journals and has registered one patent. He holds a P-rating from the South African National Research Foundation (the highest rating available to researchers <35 years old). His sterling work has attracted international recognition and awards including:

• Gertrud Meisner Award by the European Society of Mycobacteriology (2019)
• T.W. Kambule Emerging Researcher Awardby the NSTF-BHP Billiton (2015)
• Merit Award from the Claude Leon Foundation (2015)
• Meiring Naudé Medal in Recognition of Outstanding Early Career Contributions to the Furtherance of Science by the Royal Society of South Africa (2014)
• Young Investigator Prize from the International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease (2014)
• Named of the Top 200 Young South Africans by the Mail and Guardian (2014)
• Won the Silver Scientific Merit Award from the South African Medical Research Council (2014)
• Merit Award from the University of Cape Town (2013)

To put the cherry on top, Prof Theron is a member of various local and international organisations – to mention a few, he is a member of:

• The American Society of Microbiology
• The Scientific Advisory Committee, Identifying Men’s Preferences for a Male Centered TB Care Intervention, co-PIs Medina-Marino, Daniels.
• The Scientific Advisory Committee, GeneXpert Omni Evaluation Trials, Foundation for New and Innovative Diagnostics.
• The European Society for Mycobacteriology
• Member of the Scientific Advisory Committee, Tuberculosis Omics ResearCH (TORCH), co-PIs van Rie, Warren.

Prof Ntobeko Ntusi is a cardiologist, a Professor of Medicine and is the Chair and Head of Medicine at the University of Cape Town (UCT) and Groote Schuur Hospital (GSH); and is the Clinical Lead for Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance (CMR) at UCT and GSH. He is also principal investigator based at the Hatter Institute for Cardiovascular Research in Africa and the Cape Universities Body Imaging Centre.

He obtained a BSc (Hons) degree in Cellular and Molecular Biology from Haverford College, USA and an MBChB degree from UCT. 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 then completed a fellowship in Internal Medicine and a certificate in Cardiology through the Colleges of Medicine of South Africa. He read for a DPhil in Cardiovascular Medicine at the University of Oxford and completed his MD in Cardiology at UCT.

He has extensive experience with basic science, translational and clinical research and currently supervises postgraduate students and is conducting several single- and multi-centre mechanistic studies, which are mostly CMR-based. Through his research, Prof. Ntusi has built strong links with colleagues in clinical cardiology, physics and biomedical engineering, 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 studies.

He has been actively engaged and contributed to improved understanding of heart failure and cardiomyopathy, inflammatory heart disease and the application of molecular biology and advanced cardiovascular imaging techniques to the study of cardiovascular phenotypes and disease mechanisms, in in South Africa and globally. His key contributions include:

• escription of the clinical features, outcomes and genetic underpinnings of different forms of cardiomyopathy in South Africa
• description of novel applications of cardiovascular magnetic resonance in the study of cardiovascular disease
• description of the cardiovascular phenotype and pathophysiology of autoimmune forms of inflammatory heart disease with cardiovascular magnetic resonance
• first description of utility of cardiovascular magnetic resonance to delineate the phenotype of cardiovascular involvement in HIV-infected persons
• multiple reports on study of myocardial fibrosis, infiltration and inflammation in different clinical contexts.

Some of his awards and accolades include:

• Membership of the Academy of Science of South Africa – 2021;
• Induction into the University of Cape Town College of Fellows – 2021;
• Fellowship of the Royal College of Physicians (London) – 2020;
• Fellowship of the Royal Society of South Africa – 2020;
• Walter Siegenthaler Medal from University of Zurich – 2019;
• University of Oxford Oppenheimer Academic Exchange Fellowship – 2018;
• National Research Foundation Science Team Award – 2017;
• Destiny Man’s Power of Forty Award (to 40 South Africans under the age of 40 years making the largest contributions to their fields) – 2015;
• National Research Foundation Emerging Researcher Award – 2015;
• Mail and Guardian’s 200 Most Influential Young South Africans Award – 2011;

An attempt in 2022 to describe Professor Tulio de Oliveira in one sentence would probably read something like “the man who facilitated the identification of the SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern – Beta and Omicron in South Africa.”

But for a world-renowned bioinformatics scientist, with over 20 years' experience working and conducting clinic-based and population-based research, the description does not even begin to scratch the surface to capture his journey.

Prof. Tulio de Oliveira’s journey began when he received his BSc at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) in Brazil, followed by MSc and PhD at the Nelson R Mandela School of Medicine at the University of KwaZulu Natal, South Africa. He was a Marie Curie Research Fellow at the University of Oxford, U.K. from 2004 to 2006 and a Newton Advanced Fellow at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute (WTSI) and at the University of Edinburgh from 2015-2019. In 2015, he became a Professor in the School of Laboratory Medicine & Medical Sciences, College of Health Sciences, University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN), South Africa and in 2018 an Associate Professor on Global Health at the University of Washington, Seattle, USA.

Professor De Oliveira wears different leadership hats at different times and places – including but not limited to Professor of Bioinformatics, School for Data Science and Computational Thinking, Faculty of Science and Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, Stellenbosch University; and Director of the newly-established Centre for Epidemic Response and Innovation (CERI), which is also housed at the same University.

He is the Director of the KwaZulu-Natal Research Innovation & Sequencing Platform (KRISP), and a Senior Research Associate at the Centre for the AIDS Programme of Research in South Africa (CAPRISA) – both these are close-associate organisations of the South African Medical Research Council (SAMRC) that are based in Durban, South Africa.

Throughout his career, Prof. de Oliveira has worked with viral outbreaks, including HIV, Hepatitis B and C, Chikungunya, Dengue, SARS-CoV-2, Zika, and Yellow Fever Virus. Prof. de Oliveira has more than 150 publications, with many of them in, the top scientific journals such as Nature, Science and Lancet.

Most recently, Prof De Oliveira has cemented his place as of the top scientists in the forefront of the country’s fight against Covid-19 since it hit our shores – notably, he collaborated with leading research organizations to create the Network for Genomic Surveillance in South Africa (NGS-SA). This was funded largely by the SAMRC, along with the Department of Science and Innovation (DSI) to respond to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.

Professor de Oliveira has a long-standing relationship with the that spans about 15 years – all his bioinformatics servers are housed at the SAMRC. He has been the recipient of several SAMRC grant awards, including the 5–year Flagship Programme grant to understand the causes and consequences of HIV transmission.