Digby Warner leads the MRC/NHLS/UCT Molecular Mycobacteriology Research Unit (MMRU), which constitutes the University of Cape Town node of the DST/NRF Centre of Excellence for Biomedical TB Research, and is a Full Member of the Institute of Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine. His research interests lie in mycobacterial physiology, in particular the mechanisms and regulation of DNA repair and replication in Mycobacterium tuberculosis and their role in the emergence of drug resistance, the physiological consequences of drug resistance, and the role of vitamin B12 and related co-factors in mycobacterial pathogenesis.

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Professor Mulder heads the Computational Biology Division at the University of Cape Town, and leads H3ABioNet, a large Pan African Bioinformatics Network of ~30 institutions in 17 African countries. H3ABioNet aims to develop bioinformatics capacity to enable genomic data analysis on the continent by developing and providing access to skills and computing infrastructure for data analysis. Prior to her position at UCT, she worked for 9 years at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) in Cambridge, as a Team Leader for bioinformatics resources. At UCT her research focuses on genetic determinants of susceptibility to disease, African genome variation, microbiomes, microbial genomics and infectious diseases from both the host and pathogen perspectives. Her group also provides bioinformatics services for the local researchers, through which they develop visualization and analysis tools for high-throughput biology. Her team has also been involved in the development of new and improved algorithms for the analysis of complex African genetic data as well as for downstream analysis and interpretation of GWAS data. Professor Mulder is actively involved in training and education as well as curriculum development in bioinformatics and genomic medicine.

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Andrew Boulle is a Public Health Specialist with the Western Cape Department of Health and Professor in Public Health Medicine at the University of Cape Town.  He co-leads the data integration platform for CIDRI-Africa, focussing on clinical and population health questions which can be addressed through routine clinical and administrative data, and data platform innovations for the linkage of routine data with clinical research and experimental data.

Within government he oversees the development of a consolidated environment for person-level health data, which also functions as an information exchange for selected clinical information systems.  He leads the African Health Information Exchange (AHIE) project, which develops interoperability solutions in support of services for HIV and TB and other priority health conditions.

A dominant focus of his academic work has been on HIV cohort epidemiology. He is the principal investigator of the Khayelitsha HIV cohort and part of the IeDEA-SA data centre.

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Graeme Meintjes is a Professor of Medicine, Wellcome Fellow and SARChI Chair of Poverty-related Infections at the University of Cape Town. He is an Infectious Diseases Physician who undertakes consultant clinical work at Khayelitsha and Groote Schuur Hospitals. His research focuses on the clinical conditions affecting patients with advanced HIV disease including disseminated HIV-associated tuberculosis, the tuberculosis-associated immune reconstitution inflammatory syndrome (TB-IRIS) and cryptococcal meningitis. His group also investigates drug-resistant tuberculosis. He has been the PI or local PI of several clinical trials and conducts observational cohort studies that address questions related to disease pathogenesis. Recently, he was PI of the EDCTP-funded PredART trial that demonstrated that prednisone was effective and safe for the prevention of TB-IRIS in patients at high-risk starting ART. He has contributed to the development of management guidelines for HIV, TB and cryptococcal meningitis at a provincial and national level and World Health Organization Guideline Development Groups.

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Dr Sean Wasserman completed his medical degree as well as post-graduate training at the University of Cape Town. He is a Fellow of the College of Physicians and Infectious Diseases at the Colleges of Medicine of South Africa. Dr Wasserman is a Consultant and Associate Professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases and HIV Medicine at Groote Schuur Hospital and the University of Cape Town. He is a Contributing Investigator at CIDRI-Africa, where his two main research areas are new and repurposed drugs for tuberculosis (TB), with a focus on pharmacokinetics (PK) and resistance, and novel regimens and PK in TB meningitis. Other interests include HIV-associated Pneumocystis pneumonia, Staphylococcus aureus bacteraemia, and antibiotic stewardship. Sean is a member of the original cohort of the International Society for Infectious Diseases (ISID) Emerging Leaders Program and has recently been elected onto the ISID Council. He was awarded the TB Union’s Stephen Lawn TB-HIV Research Leadership Prize for 2019, as well as the Institut Mérieux and Infectious Diseases Society of Southern Africa Young Investigator Award for research in antibiotic stewardship.

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