CIDRI-Africa welcomes Professor Marc Mendelson

13 Oct 2020
Cartoon of bacilli on a two-tone circular blue background
13 Oct 2020

Head-and-shoulders photo of Marc Mendelson

CIDRI-Africa welcomed Professor Marc Mendelson to the ranks of Contributing Investigators in the last quarter of 2020. Marc is Professor of Infectious Diseases and Head of the Division of Infectious Diseases and HIV Medicine in the Department of Medicine in the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of Cape Town; he brings expertise in infection prevention and management to the Centre.

Marc specialises in mitigation of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) through development of context-specific antimicrobial stewardship programmes in low- and middle-income settings. In addition, he is active in international policy development across the One Health spectrum of AMR. “One Health” is a multi-disciplinary and multi-sectoral approach to designing and implementing interventions to improve public health[1].

He is currently UCT Principal Investigator (PI) for the SOLIDARITY trial (An international randomized trial of additional treatments for COVID-19 in hospitalized patients who are all receiving the local standard of care), and co-investigator and South African PI on Optimising antibiotic use along surgical pathways: addressing antimicrobial resistance and improving surgical outcomes.

He is chair of the Ministerial Advisory Committee on AMR, co-chair of the South African Antibiotic Stewardship Programme (SAASP), South Africa Lead for Global Health Security Agenda Prevent-1 work package on AMR, and director of the National Training Centre for Antibiotic Stewardship at Groote Schuur Hospital. Recently, he was chair of the first South African Ministerial Advisory Committee on COVID-19 (Clinicians Group), and is now a member of the Committee on COVID-19’s second iteration.

Internationally, he is a member of the scientific advisory group of the Global Antibiotic Research & Development Partnership (GARDP), a member of the World Health Organisation (WHO) Expert Panel on Drug Evaluation and multiple other WHO technical working groups relating to AMR, and a member of the G20 AMR Hub Stakeholder Group.

Marc tweets at @SouthAfricanASP and has been known to rummage through sharps bins for research purposes.