The University of Cape Town invites you to an inaugural lecture by Professor Mark Engel.

Topic: We are here too - Contributing African Strep A research towards eliminating Rheumatic Heart Disease.

Rheumatic heart disease (RHD), despite being largely unseen in developed countries, remains rampant in poorer communities and low-resourced settings around the world. Strep A, the bacteria responsible for the antecedent sore throat infection believed to initiate the immune processes involved in RHD development, is largely unresearched in Africa.

About our speaker

Prof Mark E Engel networks with African colleagues to apply a wide range of investigative approaches, from molecular to population-based research to all aspects of RHD. In 2016, he established the AFROStrep Study, in efforts to improve the understanding of the role of group A streptococcus in RHD development. His work, supported over the years by the SA National Research Foundation, the SA Medical Research Council, the American Heart Association and NIH in the USA, has been presented both nationally and internationally. Together with the late Bongani Mayosi, Mark managed the RHDGen Study, an Africa-wide initiative to investigate molecular aspects of RHD, reporting novel insights in susceptibility genes and proteomic profiles in RHD.

Starting out as a laboratory scientist, Engel later was a Harvard University fellow in Public Health in 2001, before pursuing a career in epidemiology. He joined University of Cape Town in 2007, eventually being awarded his PhD in 2013 for a large longitudinal study on the epidemiology of RHD in children, in Cape Town. Based at the Cape Heart Institute and Department of Medicine, UCT, Mark also teaches health research methods while supervising postgraduate students. He is a member of the African Union/PASCAR Education Taskforce and the Burden of Disease Working Group of the Strep A Vaccine Global Consortium (SAVAC).