Dear Staff and Student Colleagues

I am delighted to announce the appointment of Associate Professor Zenda Woodman, as Assistant Dean - Transformation and Social Impact in the Faculty of Health Sciences. She has served in this role since 1st February 2026, which will continue until the 30th April 2029. 

In this important leadership role, she will provide strategic and operational direction for one of the Faculty’s most critical priorities: advancing meaningful transformation and deepening social accountability across all dimensions of our work — teaching, research, service, and institutional culture. This is not a symbolic portfolio, but a core driver of how the Faculty understands its responsibility to society, to health equity, and to the training of health professionals for a complex and unequal context.

Associate Professor Woodman is an academic in the Department of Integrative Biomedical Sciences whose work spans research, teaching, and institutional leadership. Her research has focused on HIV pathogenesis, including Subtype C viral transmission, immune responses, and disease progression, with more recent work extending to the intersection of infectious disease and reproductive health, including preterm birth and bacterial vaginosis in the South African context.

Alongside her research contributions, she has made significant impact in teaching across both the Faculty of Health Sciences and the Faculty of Science. She has held key leadership roles as convenor and co-convenor of core courses and has been actively involved in curriculum development, renewal, and transformation. Her commitment to rethinking what and how we teach has been recognised through completion of the Educational Leadership Fellowship and the awarding of a UCT Distinguished Teacher Award.

Importantly, Associate Professor Woodman has long been deeply engaged in institutional transformation and social accountability work at departmental, Faculty, and University levels. She previously served as Co-Chair of the Faculty Transformation and Equity Committee and contributed to the development of the Faculty Transformation Framework, helping to shape the Faculty’s conceptual and operational approach to equity and inclusion. At University level, she has served on key governance and transformation structures, including Senate, the Institutional Forum, the Transformation Forum, and the Employment Equity Forum. As Co-Chair of the University Social Responsiveness, Ethics and Transformation Committee (USETC), a Committee of Council, she contributed to institutional oversight and strategic leadership in advancing transformation and social accountability across the University.

We warmly welcome Associate Professor Woodman into this role. Her appointment represents a strengthening of the Faculty’s commitment to transformation as a defining feature of who we are and how we work.

We look forward to her leadership in advancing a Faculty that is more equitable, more socially responsive, and more deeply aligned with the health needs of the communities we serve.

Enkosi kakhulu.

Kaise ge gangans

Professor Lionel Green-Thompson
Dean: Faculty of Health Sciences