South Africa

Kelly Chibale is a professor of organic chemistry at the University of Cape Town (UCT) where he holds the Neville Isdell Chair in African-centric Drug Discovery & Development. He is also a member of the UCT Institute of infectious disease & molecular medicine, founding Director of the South African medical research council drug discovery & development research unit at UCT and the Founder and Director of the UCT drug discovery and development centre, H3D, a Johnson and Johnson (J&J) Satellite Centre for Global Health Discovery. His research interest is in infectious disease drug discovery. Kelly obtained his PhD in Synthetic Organic Chemistry from the University of Cambridge in the UK. This was followed by postdoctoral stints at the University of Liverpool in the UK and at the Scripps Research Institute in the USA. He was a Sandler Sabbatical Fellow at the University of California San Francisco, a US Fulbright Senior Research Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, and a Visiting Professor at Pfizer.  He is a recipient of many awards and honors, including being named by Fortune magazine as one of the World’s 50 Greatest Leaders in 2018. He previously served as an Associate Editor of Journal of Medicinal Chemistry.  

Cara Schwarz is a professor of Chemical Engineering at Stellenbosch University as well as associate editor for Journal of Chemical and Engineering Data. Professor Schwarz’s research focus lies in fluid phase thermodynamics and its implications for separation processes. She is in particularly known for her experimental work on asymmetric and non-ideal systems at both high and low pressure. To date she has nearly 100 international peer-reviewed publications and contributed to over 160 conference presentations. She has graduated 9 PhD and 24 Masters students with a further 4 PhD and 5 Masters students currently being supervised. Further, Professor Schwarz currently holds a B rating from the South African National Research Foundation.  In 2018 Professor Schwarz was appointed as the first female professor in the Faculty of Engineering and throughout her career has promoted chemical engineering research amongst females.

Professor Dean Brady is an Industrial Biochemist with experience in the chemicals, leather and food industries; including LIRI, AECI and the CSIR. Research interests are in Green and Sustainable Chemistry, in particular Biocatalysis. Previously a doctoral student at Rhodes University, visiting research fellow at TU Delft, Professor Emeritus at TUT and Chief Scientist at the CSIR, he currently Professor of Biocatalysis at the University of the Witwatersrand and Director of the Molecular Sciences Institute. In he was a recipient of the CSIR President’s Award in 2008 and The Sasol Sustainable Chemistry Medal from SACI in 2023.

Anwar completed his PhD in Organic Chemistry at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in 1995, followed by postdoctoral research in the fields of Drug Discovery and Medicinal Chemistry.  His journey started out at UCT Medical School, followed by GlaxoSmithkline R&D in Stevenage (UK) and later at Harvard Medical School (MA, USA). He left academia and joined Johnson Matthey Pharma Outsourcing Division (MA, USA) and later Gillette Advanced Technology Centre (MA, US). Being part of a FMCG company, his research was focused on personal care product innovation. The latter interest is continuing in the form of consulting for Unilever SA. He returned to South Africa in 2004 to start a career in academia, first at the University of Stellenbosch and then later at the University of Cape Town where he is currently an Associate Professor in Organic Chemistry. His research interests are broad, ranging from natural product synthesis, cancer drug discovery and bioluminescence probe design. Anwar is passionate about the valorisation of biomass in the context of the biorefinery. Green and sustainable chemistry now overarches his entire approach to synthesis using biomass waste as a resource.

Scientific publishing has been at the heart of my Marta’s professional activity for over 20 years: her first job was with a university consortium, with the responsibility to negotiate collective contracts with international publishers on behalf of academic & government institutions. This experience led her to hold regional sales roles for international companies such as Thomson Reuters (now Clarivate), Wolters Kluwer and very recently ACS Publications, where she is looking after the Southern European academic, government and corporate STEM markets.

Dr. Raines received her B.S. in Biochemistry from Eckerd College in 2010 with a minor in Spanish. She then joined the Johns Hopkins University, School of Medicine where she conducted her PhD study in Biochemistry, Cellular and Molecular Biology. After completing her PhD in 2016, Dr. Lily Raines started her career at the American Chemical Society (ACS) as a Global Projects Manager working on International Activities. She soon became a Manager at the Office of Science Outreach in 2017. Dr. Raines is currently holding the position of Senior Manager for the Office of Science Outreach at the ACS.

Polina has over 10 years of experience in the academic publishing sector, with a particular emphasis on strategic marketing and regional campaign management. Currently, she works as a Senior Marketing Manager at ACS Publications, where she focuses on the EMEA region. Polina is based in Oxford, UK.

Veresha Dukhi is the Customer Success Manager at CAS (A division of the American Chemical Society). She is based in Durban, South Africa. She obtained her PhD in analytical chemistry at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. In her previous roles she served as a lecturer at UKZN.