A/Prof. Delva Shamley has held several senior positions in the Faculty of Health Sciences. 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 FHS (UCT); Head of Physiotherapy at Oxford Brookes University (OBU); Deputy Director for Research (OBU); Deputy Director of Bournemouth Clinical Trials Unit (UK); 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) and EDCTP (EU).
A/Prof. Shamley teaches across several disciplines including lecturing MBChB undergraduate students in clinical reasoning, gross anatomy, and histology; and Registrar MMed Research Methods and Research Supervision, training and mentoring of clinicians to design, plan and implement clinical research.
A/Prof. 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. Her research 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 South Africa. She developed the first Early Warning System (EWS) to identify patients at risk of developing complications in response to treatment which is being used in the UK and Australia. 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.
A/Prof. Shamley has an executive MBA which together with her leadership experience, anatomical, clinical and research background, makes her an ideal Head for a department as multifaceted as the Department of Human Biology.