Every year, since 2017, Stellenbosch University (SU) has awarded the top 20 postdoctoral research fellows at the university. It is a highly prestigious achievement to be ranked among them – and in 2021, seven of the university's top 20 postdoctoral research fellows came from the Faculty of Medicine and Health Services (FMHS).
The seven top fellows from the FMHS are Dr Caroline Beltran (Molecular Biology and Human Genetics), Dr Haiko Schurz (Biomedical Sciences), Dr Josu Gomez-Ezeiza (Sport Science), Dr Leigh Kotze (Molecular Biology and Human Genetics), Dr Eyitayo Owolabi (Global Health), Dr Teun Van Erp (Orthopaedic Surgery) and Dr Lovemore Kunorozva (Sport Science).
Dr Palesa Mothapo, Head of SU's Postdoctoral Research Support Office, said the FMHS researchers had excelled in a highly competitive process. She said the concept of the top 20 awards was introduced in 2017 at the initiative of Professor Eugene Cloete, Deputy Vice-Chancellor: Research, Innovation and Postgraduate Studies. Criteria for ranking in the top 20 include the output of publications during their postdoctoral period at Stellenbosch, as well as community service, engagement with the scientific community, participation in teaching, a commitment to their own continuous learning as well as the grants they are awarded.
“We have a large number of postdocs coming from the FMHS so it is highly competitive. The six who made it into the top 20 were really exceptional and outstanding," Mothapo said.
Dr Caroline Beltran, a molecular biologist with an interest in systems-based approaches for immune profiling, has, since her PhD, focused her research on the field of infectious diseases, particularly tuberculosis, because of its high incidence in South Africa. Her postdoctoral research has focused on developing tools for the detection of rare sub-populations of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, assessed in a clinical trial (PREDICT TB) and published in the journal Frontiers in Cellular and Infection Microbiology.
Her current research focuses on the development of advanced imaging techniques to allow for modelling TB disease in three dimensions.
Beltran has collaborated extensively both locally and internationally and is a prominent co-author in six high-impact publications, including Nature Medicine. In 2020, she was awarded the prestigious and highly competitive Crick African Network Accelerator award, funded by the Francis Crick Institute. The award invests in 17 early-career researchers from African countries who have demonstrated strong scientific and leadership potential to transition them to independence.
She is also passionate about teaching, student development and scientific engagement and is involved in postgraduate student supervision, hands-on training for molecular biology techniques, coordinating and lecturing the honours postgraduate course as well as serving on several committees within the division.
Dr Haiko Schurz's main research focus has been investigating the genetic contribution to TB susceptibility. He compares genetics of individuals with TB and individuals without TB in an attempt to identify genetic variants or patterns that could be linked to TB susceptibility or protection from TB.
Beyond this he specifically focuses on the male-bias observed in TB incidence rates. Globally nearly twice as many males develop TB compared to females and this male-bias is not purely due to socioeconomic/behavioural and cultural circumstances, but also is rooted in the effects that sex hormones (oestrogen for females and testosterone for males) have on the immune system. Male sex hormones generally downregulate the immune system and female hormones upregulate the immune system which could give them an advantage when fighting TB infection (this needs to still be proven for TB).
As soon as he manages to get grant funding for the work, Schurz will begin an investigation of how sex-hormones influence TB susceptibility.
Currently and for next year he will be investigating the genetic component that contributes to the male sex-bias, i.e. are there genetic differences between males and females that further contribute to the observed bias.
Dr Josu Gomez-Ezeiza's research was focused on the development of the MaRooN Health Passport, aimed at looking after the health and wellbeing of all staff and students on campus. Staff and students are invited to complete the health passport through a primary online screening questionnaire, created for SU, and used as a collection point of self-reported data from a combination of health-digital screening tools. The responses from the online screening questionnaire are analysed to create and send automatised individual reports, forming Maties Risk of Non-Communicable Diseases (MaRooN) Health Passports. Medical 'flags' relating to staff or students with current medical conditions are delivered to the Campus Health Services so that they can be addressed.
Gomez-Ezeiza, who worked for the Spanish Olympic team before coming to South Africa at the end of 2019, said that roll-out of the MaRooN Health Passport was done to the entire university between April and August 2021, with more than 3 000 responses and 400 flags addressed by Campus Health Services.
He and the team, already published one paper on the subject and they are working on another six papers based on the data created by this research platform.
Gomez-Ezeiza said a second leg of this project is to generate health policies for the university.
“For instance if we see certain health flags, we can create interventions to deal with them," he said.
Gomez-Ezeiza has moved to the School for Data Science at SU and currently is working in the field of sports analytics.
As a postdoc for the Immunology Research Group (IRG), Dr Leigh Kotze's main objective has been to develop a 3D in vitro model of human TB granulomas, which are small lesions in the lungs which develop when a person is infected with Mycobacterium tuberculosis. The granuloma is important to help contain TB from spreading further into the lungs and body. However, because granulomas are small and cannot be removed from a living person's lung, the only way to investigate how they function is to create a model which can be studied in a laboratory. Kotze and her supervisor, Associate Professor Nelita du Plessis, have studied the granulomas by taking immune cells from the lung (alveolar macrophages), infecting them with Mycobacterium tuberculosis or its non-infectious counterpart BCG, inducing the formation of a 3D structure using magnetic beads and a magnetic levitation field, before adding other immune cell types important for the formation of the granuloma. They have shown in their publication that these 3D models are more realistic representatives of what is happening in the lung compared to traditional methods of cellular investigation. In 2022, Kotze will be pursuing new opportunities in the immunology field overseas but hopes to continue contributing to the TB research field, continuing strong collaborations with Du Plessis and the IRG lab.
Dr Eyitayo Owolabi's research cuts across different public and global health topics including non-communicable diseases, HIV/AIDS, reproductive health, and recently, global surgery.
Her independent and collaborative research projects for the past two years have focused on exploring barriers to accessing timely care for surgical conditions, including injuries and breast cancer, in low-resource settings in South Africa. These barriers were looked at from individual, community, and health system perspectives. The studies revealed the significant role of social determinants on an individual's decision to seek care and reaching the health facility promptly. This includes things such as neighbourhood crime, gangsterism, lack of transport options, education, and perception of health and healthcare quality.
With diabetes being the second leading cause of death in South Africa, Owolabi also did quantitative and qualitative research projects looking at the quality of diabetes care in low-resource settings in the Eastern Cape, and the knowledge of individuals with diabetes on diabetes complications such as amputation and its prevention.
Her other research activities were on gender-based violence and reproductive health and desk reviews on telemedicine potentials for addressing barriers to surgical care in developing countries, and hypertension and obesity prevalence in Nigeria.
In 2022, she will be organising community-based intervention and training programmes to address some of the knowledge gaps found in her previous research projects. She will also implement more research projects, apply for early-career grants and find more opportunities for collaboration.
In his PhD, titled “Load, Intensity and Performance in professional road cycling", Dr Teun van Erp looked at the demands of different races on professional cyclists and at what it takes to win the professional cycling races. Van Erp, who has a background in Physiotherapy and Human Movement Sciences, worked as a sport scientist at the professional cycling team Sunweb and its predecessors in the Netherlands between 2011 and 2019, during which the team was highly successful in races.
During his time with the team, he collected a great deal of training data of both male and female professional cyclists which he analysed as part of his PhD. He discovered a passion for research and science and moved to SU to do his postdoctoral research.
During his one and a half years at SU, Van Erp used this large data-set to publish research about professional cycling, including the demands of different races and what it takes to win professional cycling races.
Van Erp left the university a few months ago and is currently working as a sport scientist for one of the world's biggest cycling teams, Ineos-Grenadiers.
Another recipient of the Top 20 Postdoctoral Fellowship is Dr Lovemore Kunorozva, a molecular biologist with an interest in the molecular basis of exercise science and sports medicine. Since his appointment at ISEM, he has focussed his research on understanding immune response in individuals with disabilities, specifically those with spinal cord injury (SCI) who get sick with infections such as colds, flu and pneumonia more often after their injury than before their injury.
“It is likely because their immune system is not able to respond properly to the bugs and viruses," said Kunorozva. At present it's not known if SCI makes the immune function worse in chronic SCI-patients.
“It is especially important to study this population now because of the latest pandemic coronavirus outbreak. Recurrent infections have profound personal and community impact, with significant reductions in participation, employment and general well-being. A more complete understanding on how the immune system works in these patients might allow us a greater understanding of why they are prone to infections. The knowledge we are gaining from this research might also help to understand the immune function in other populations," he explained.
Kunorozva is collaborating with both locally and internationally recognised researchers on this project.
Kunorozva is passionate about imparting the knowledge he has gained to other students through teaching, student development and scientific engagement. He is a committee member of the SU-Postdoctoral Society which represents the interests of the postdocs within the structures of SU and connects postdocs via meetings, events and social activities. He is currently involved in postgraduate student supervision, and hands-on training of honours and MSc students conducting systematic reviews. Kunorozva is also involved in other research projects investigating illnesses and injuries in athletes with disabilities and collaborates with others in research on injuries in collegiate rugby athletes.
His future research plans are to expand research on the molecular basis of sports and exercise science within the ISEM to include a mini laboratory where genetics research will also be conducted to answer various research questions.
Kunorozva is extremely elated on being awarded one of the Top 20 Postdoctoral Research Fellows recognising his efforts in research and student supervision. He says this can only serve to motivate him even more than before.
