TOP SOFT-FUNDED ACADEMIC AND RESEARCH STAFF (SFARS) AWARDS

In recognition of the significant role played by soft-funded staff and with support from a Vice-Chancellor's Strategic Award and the UCT Faculty of Health Sciences, a funding call was sent out within the Faculty for the above award.

The following researchers received the award:

In the Associate Professor/Professor category:

Professor Linda-Gail Bekker: Desmond Tutu HIV Centre

Professor Bekker's research strategy has involved 3 key aspects: Clinical research, Health Service research and experimental hypothesis driven research

The primary theme for these approaches has included clinical and basic science of HIV and tuberculosis and other related conditions. This theme has now expanded to include issues pertinent to key populations such as young women, men who have sex with men (MSM), leveraging lessons learned in HIV medicine to investigate other aspects of primary health care, health seeking and other human behaviours, community engagement, behavioural economics and other aspects of social and behavioural science requiring diversification of her operations team to include a wide range of medical and allied to medicine disciplines.

Her guiding principle for all of this is to build capacity across a wide diversity of cadres in the clinical teams, mentor young clinicians and scientists and develop new research careers particularly in postgraduate medicine and public health, to conduct collaborative research where ever possible and to safeguard human subject protection and conduct the most ethical, compassionate and mutually respectful clinical research. This has involved significant investment in community development, engagement and education in communities in and around Cape Town.

Professor Willem Hanekom: South African Tuberculosis Vaccine Initiative

Professor Willem Hanekom trained in paediatrics and in paediatric infectious diseases, after which he completed a postdoc in immunology at Rockefeller University in New York City.

Willem is currently Director of the South African Tuberculosis Vaccine Initiative (SATVI), which tests new TB vaccine strategies in humans. In addition, the group addresses clinical and immunological questions that hamper TB vaccine development. Among these, large cutting edge studies aim to identify biomarkers of risk of TB disease. The latter projects have led to novel insights into TB pathogenesis, by delineating the role of inflammatory mechanisms.

Willem has authored >100 publications, and has been successful in generating >R100m in competitive research funding from the NIH, EDCTP and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, among others. He is actively involved in training postgraduate students. Willem is past president of the South African Immunological Society and of the Federation of African Immunological Societies. He is the founder of the TB Vaccine Consortium of South Africa. Willem has won various research and teaching awards and is a regular invited speaker at international meetings. He serves on multiple World Health Organization-affiliated and other international advisory committees in TB vaccine development and translational immunology.

Associate Professor Crick Lund: Department of Psychiatry and Mental Health

The field of public mental health research is growing rapidly, both nationally and globally. Since the launch of the Alan J Flisher Centre for Public Mental Health at UCT in 2010, A/Prof Lund has successfully led bids for two major international research grants: the Programme for Improving Mental Health Care (PRIME - www.prime.uct.ac.za) funded by the Department for International Development (DFID, UK), and the AFrica Focus on Intervention Research for Mental health (AFFIRM - www.affirm.uct.ac.za), funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH, USA). The Centre for Public Mental Health now leads research in 8 countries in sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia.

A/Prof Lund's strategic research vision is to build on existing local and international research partnerships, to address a number of key priorities: implementation science (the development, evaluation and scaling up of packages of mental health care, integrated into primary health care in low and middle-income countries (LMIC)); strengthening policy and health systems to improve mental health outcomes in LMIC; and studying the social determinants of mental health in LMIC, including evaluating interventions that can break the cycle of poverty and mental illness. Central to this vision is building research capacity and translating research findings into policy and practice.

Associate Professor Helen McIlleron: Division of Clinical Pharmacology

To facilitate access to drugs that can be used safely and effectively, studies are needed in the relevant patient populations. There is a particular need for such studies to optimize treatment of children and pregnant women with tuberculosis (TB) or HIV, and patients with HIV associated TB who are neglected by traditional pre-marketing research. Helen's work has focused on these populations, has highlighted the need for such research within the relevant contexts (of co-administered drugs, age, disease, nutrition, genetics, socio-economic environment and the health care system) and has supported national and international treatment guidelines for children and adults with TB and HIV. She works very closely with the pharmacology laboratory and the postgraduate student-based pharmacometrics team. Together they form an internationally recognised team and a unique resource in Africa, which can conduct studies and sophisticated analyses evaluating the relationships between drug exposures and effects, informing patient care policies and research agendas. She collaborates with teams conducting a variety of clinical studies across Africa, but also envisages broadening the scope of their activities to include treatment outcomes, safety and the analysis of drug-resistance data from clinical cohorts collected in operational settings. Thus integrated pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic/pharmacogenetic models including pharmacoepidemiological and pharmacoeconomic data would predict best approaches for treatment programmes.

Associate Professor Landon Myer: School of Public Health and Family Medicine

Landon Myer's principle research interests are in the prevention and treatment of HIV infection, focusing in particular on critical issues in maternal and child health. This work has spanned clinic- and population-based questions, drawing on his background in epidemiology, the social sciences, and clinical medicine. His research and postgraduate supervision has led to a number of awards, including an International Leadership Award from the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation (2011) and the British Association Award for an outstanding young researcher from the Southern African Association for the Advancement of Science (2012).

Landon's current research and future plans focus on two major new studies based at the Gugulethu Community Health Centre and developed in collaboration with the Desmond Tutu HIV Centre in the Institute of Infectious Diseases and Molecular Medicine: the first on antiretroviral therapy in pregnancy, focusing on postpartum adherence and retention of HIV-infected women and their HIV-exposed children, and the second on the provision of family planning for HIV-infected women to prevent unintended pregnancies. In addition he works closely in the Department of Paediatrics & Child Health at Red Cross War Memorial Children's Hospital on research cohorts examining the health effects of HIV exposure in infants, and the chronic disease manifestations of HIV disease in older children and adolescents.

In the Lecturer/Senior Lecturer category:

Dr Chris Colvin: School of Public Health and Family Medicine

Chris Colvin is a medical anthropologist with a PhD in social anthropology and an MPH in epidemiology. For the last five years, he has worked to strengthen social science theory and method in public health. His research has considered how communities, civil society, and the state engage with each other around health and understand their respective roles, responsibilities and capacities in improving public health. He has examined HIV and gender transformation; task shifting to support ART and PMTCT; community participation in health governance; AIDS activism and global health diplomacy; and health systems reform to address the HIV and TB epidemics. He is also interested in how social science evidence can be integratied more effectively into health policymaking. Chris recently contributed several systematic reviews of qualitative evidence to the WHO's first set of official guidelines to formally incorporate qualitative evidence. In his teaching, he has helped develop the social science curriculum in the MPH and strengthen training for postgraduates working across disciplines. This effort has recently been recognised by the NIH through the joint award to Chris and Professor Mark Lurie from Brown University, of a five-year training grant to support teaching, training and research in HIV social sciences at UCT. This initiative will further strengthen the contribution of the social sciences in public health teaching and research.

Dr Thomas Scriba: South African Tuberculosis Vaccine Initiative

Tom Scriba is Senior Research Officer and Deputy Director, Immunology at the South African Tuberculosis Vaccine Initiative (SATVI). His research focuses on three interconnected key areas that address important knowledge gaps relevant to rational TB vaccine development, namely, correlates of risk of TB, the role of inflammation in TB immunopathogenesis, and immunology underlying TB vaccine development. Advances in these areas would immediately benefit the global TB vaccine community.

Tom has published 47 papers in international peer-reviewed journals and is leading efforts to understand the immunology of vaccination against TB in humans. He currently holds research grants from the EDCTP, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the MRC. His vision is to further develop a very strong research group focused on the 3 areas above. Tom's position at SATVI allows implementation of newly gained knowledge to advancing clinical development of TB vaccines both at UCT and, through networks and partnerships, globally.