Ntobeko Ntusi
Professor, Unitversity of Cape Town
President and Chief Executive Officer, South African Medical Research Council
Prof. Ntobeko Ntusi is the President and Chief Executive Officer of the South African Medical Research Council and Professor of Medicine at the University of Cape Town.
He has a lifelong passion for evidence-based healthcare, health systems research, noncommunicable disease multimorbidity scholarship, and universal health coverage. His primary research interests comprise: (1) noncommunicable disease (NCD) epidemiology, natural history, multimorbidity, and outcomes; (2) intersection of NCDs and infections; (3) cardiovascular disease in Africans (including HIV-associated cardiovascular disease, tuberculosis-associated cardiovascular disease, rheumatic heart disease, cardiomyopathy, and resistant hypertension); and (4) cardiovascular molecular biology and immunology.
He currently supervises postgraduate students and is conducting several single-centre mechanistic clinical studies, multi-centre studies and clinical trials, and population health studies. Through this research, his unit has built strong international collaborative links and demonstrated capacity for performance in scientific investigational teams as part of multi-disciplinary and multi-centre clinical studies.
What attracted you to the GLISTEN program?
“Dr Mark Siedner and I have been chatting for some time, sharing ideas.
There was a clear shared sense of value, a shared sense of vision about the kind of science that we would like to do and a shared sense of vision of the kind of impact we would like to have on our region.”
What do you see as the most exciting opportunities for the GLISTEN initiative?
“It’s being able to drive a new area of scholarship that has historically been overlooked and that is the nexus of infections in non-communicable diseases (NCDs).
To take a multi-prong approach that focuses on disease mechanisms, focuses on outcomes, focuses on optimal treatments but importantly takes a very strong Implementation science approach that will aim to influence policy and change practice as the key fundamental goals of the consortium.”
If you could tell a funding organisation one thing about GLISTEN and its potential to change the way we do science, what would it be?
“It’s a really exciting endeavour which is African-centred, proposing very bold ideas of thinking about science with impact.
Every funder should want to be associated with this network.”
