Dear Staff and Student Colleagues 

I would like to extend a warm welcome to Associate Professor Delva Shamley who has recently been appointed as Head of Department: Human Biology, as of 1 June 2023. Associate Professor Shamley is an experienced health professional, academic and researcher. She has served in several senior positions in the Faculty including as Head of the Division of Clinical Anatomy and Biological Anthropology and acting Head of the Department of Human Biology. I wish her continued success in this role. 

I am deeply grateful to Professor Sharon Prince who served in this role for the last three years, for her strong leadership of a flourishing department and her invaluable contribution to the management team. Professor Prince is currently serving as the Interim Deputy Dean: Research. 
 
Delva Shamley is an Associate Professor in Human Biology. She obtained a BSc (Med), BSc Physiotherapy (Hons) and a PhD from the University of the Witwatersrand. She has a track record of postgraduate student supervision to PhD level, publications and grant success.  
 
Key positions have included Director of the Clinical Research Centre in the Faculty at the University of Cape Town (UCT), Head of Physiotherapy at Oxford Brookes University (OBU), Deputy Director for Research (OBU), Deputy Director; Bournemouth Clinical Trials Unit (United Kingdom). International Consultant OxCATT, Visiting Professor University of Nigeria, Enugu. External consultancies include peer reviewing for journals and grant reviewing for the HTA (UK), NRF (SA), Flanders Foundation (Belgium), AREF (MRC, UK),  and EDCTP (EU). She teaches across several disciplines including lecturing MBChB undergraduates in clinical reasoning, gross anatomy and histology; Registrar MMed Research Methods and Research Supervision training and mentoring of clinicians to design, plan and implement clinical research. 
 
Associate Professor Shamley is a founding member of the African Clinical Trials Consortium and consults in Africa and the UK on developing business plans for Clinical Trials Units. She leads a multi-professional research group who carry out laboratory and clinical service research. The programme includes proteomics and genomics of latent effects of adjuvant therapy in breast cancer survivors. She is also committed to the development of care pathways for post cancer treatment morbidity, which provides evidence for the Cancer Survivorship Plan for SA. In addition, she has a team exploring potential systemic causes of morbidity by correlating the clinical phenotype of the shoulder after treatment for breast cancer with biomarkers of inflammation and angiogenesis, and their associated genetic variants. 
 
Associate Professor Shamley has an executive MBA which together with her leadership experience, anatomical, clinical and research background, makes her an ideal leader for a department as multifaceted as Human Biology. I wish her well and hope that she encounters success and fulfilment on this journey. 
 
 
Kaise ke gangans
Associate Professor Lionel Green-Thompson
Dean: Faculty of Health Sciences