Organising Committee

Goonaseelan (Colin) Pillai is committed to driving programs that develop scientific capability in low and middle-income countries. A clinical pharmacologist who trained in Durban, South Africa, Colin previously worked at the corporate headquarters of Novartis and Roche in Switzerland. He has a specialist interest in the application of non-linear mixed effects models to pharmacokinetic-pharmacodynamic data across a wide range of therapeutic areas. In Pharma, he played leadership roles in bringing internal and external acceptance of applying mathematical models to decision making in drug development. His most recent Pharma role involved establishing programs that allowed sharing scientific expertise and infrastructure with researchers and institutions in LMIC. Colin has held teaching, research and management positions at the Universities of Durban-Westville and Witwatersrand. He acquired his clinical and research experience in hospital and community pharmacy and as a consultant with the SA Medical Research Council’s Tuberculosis Research program, where he ran a unit conducting Phase 1 clinical trials. Colin continues to maintain active academic links with numerous institutions in Africa including via formal Honorary Professorships and Board Member status. Since November 2017, he is a Senior Advisor on capacity development and training programs for global health to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Prof Bernd Rosenkranz is medical doctor, registered Clinical Pharmacologist in Germany and South Africa and Fellow of the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Medicine (UK). He has many years experience in clinical drug development in international pharmaceutical industry. From 2008 – 2016, he was head of the Division of Clinical Pharmacology at Stellenbosch University. He is President of Fundisa African Academy of Medicines Development in Cape Town (established in 2014), visiting scientist at the Institute for Clinical Pharmacology and Toxicology at the Charité in Berlin, and Honorary Member of the South African Society for Basic and Clinical Pharmacology (SASBCP). He is Specialty Chief Editor of the Drugs Outcomes Research and Policies section of Frontiers in Pharmacology. His professional interests are in capacity development initiatives around medicines development and regulation in Africa, for example as member of the scientific core team of a programme to train regulators at SAHPRA and medicines regulatory agencies in Africa. Prof Bernd Rosenkranz is vice treasurer of the Manenberg Aftercare Centre in Cape Town, airport chaplain at in Berlin and lives near Potsdam in Germany.

Kanshukan Rajaratnam is the Director of the School for Data Science and Computational Thinking and an Associate Professor in the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science at Stellenbosch University. He holds a doctoral degree in systems engineering from the University of Virginia. Prior to his doctoral studies, he worked in industry – Accenture and Nedbank in South Africa and Capital One in the U.S.A. He then taught finance at the University of Cape Town (UCT) for nine years. At UCT, he held various leadership positions including Acting Dean of the Commerce Faculty. In the past, his research focus was on the application of data science and operations research in banking and finance. Currently, he is collaborating in research focussing on long covid, vaccine injury, medical ethics, and developing a cross-country database for non-communicable diseases. He is rated by the National Research Foundation as an internationally acclaimed researcher.

I am a researcher working at the intersection of physiology, pharmacology, pharmacometrics, and data science, with an interest in neuroscience when possible. My academic background includes a MSc in Molecular Biology, a PhD in Physiology, and further postgraduate training in pharmacometrics and modelling as an Applied Pharmacometrics Training (APT) fellow. My data analysis and modelling work is primarily conducted in R. I like to reason from a first principles perspective and find myself motivated by all the different problems to solve around me. A multidisciplinary mindset is needed to navigate the possibilities of an open future.

Sunday O. Oladejo received his PhD in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from the University of Cape Town, South Africa, in 2021. He is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the School for Data Science and Computational Thinking, Stellenbosch University, South Africa. From 2007 to 2017, he was a Senior Core Network Engineer with GloMobile, Nigeria. His research interests include artificial intelligence, swarm intelligence, optimization, computational thinking, data science and analytics. He loves hiking, playing chess, and reading biographies.

Tirhani Maluleke has a PhD in Pharmacology and a Postgraduate Diploma in Pharmaceutical Medicine from the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa. She has more than 17 years of experience in the pharmaceutical industry in various fields including market access, regulatory, and Clinical Trials; with special interest and expertise in regulatory/start-up, compliance and pharmacovigilance. With 7+ years in a senior / management role, her duties include training, mentoring and coaching junior colleagues. She has worked across different pharma companies, CROs and the South African Health Products Regulatory Authority (formerly, Medicines Control Council). Outside her professional role, she has been involved in various community building projects which mainly focused on mentoring, training and upskilling young people in townships and rural areas.

Catriona Waitt is a Professor of Clinical Pharmacology and Global Health at the University of Liverpool, UK, and is undertaking her Wellcome Clinical Research Career Development Fellow at the Infectious Diseases Institute, Makerere University College of Health Sciences, Kampala, Uganda. Her major interest is drug dosing and safety in populations who are complex and often neglected from clinical trials, particularly pregnant and breastfeeding mothers and their infants. She brings together clinical trials, pharmacokinetic modelling, bioanalysis, bioethics and community engagement, and is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board for Pharmacometrics Africa. She loves to think outside the box and break silos between disciplines and sectors.

Karin Steinecke undertook her medical studies at Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg from 1998 to 2004. Subsequently, from 2004 to 2017, she got trained as an anaesthesiologist, primarily specializing in intensive care medicine, working as a senior physician at the ICU. In 2017, she transitioned to Charité Berlin, joining the Clinic for Anaesthesiology and Intensive Care Medicine CCM/CVK, where she currently holds the position of a senior aphysician in intensive care medicine and the outpatient department for post-intensive care patients. Since 2018, she has been an integral part of the tele-intensive care team and actively contributed to the establishment of a telemedicine network in the Berlin/Brandenburg region. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Steinecke played a crucial role in developing and overseeing international telemedicine collaborations and projects. Her responsibilities included fostering partnerships with various countries such as Uzbekistan, Uganda, Ukraine, South Africa, Montenegro, and Israel. Particularly noteworthy was her achievement in facilitating knowledge transfer through educational initiatives and training programs supported by telemedicine. Since 2024, Dr. Steinecke has received funding from Stiftung Charité as a Clinical Fellow, focusing on the topic of “Consolidation of an international hospital network to establish a structured, telemedicine-assisted training curriculum for intensive care medicine (TEMPERA).”