Dr Elouise Kroon was one of 21 handpicked “Young Physician Leaders" in the world to take part in this year's leadership training programme of the InterAcademy Partnership (IAP), which was recently held in Berlin, Germany.
The IAP Young Physicians Leaders (YPL) programme is aimed at emerging leaders (under the age of 40) who work in medicine and public health, and who show great promise for leadership in their chosen careers.
Kroon, a research medical officer in the Division of Molecular Biology and Human Genetics at Stellenbosch University's Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, was one of only two South Africans selected to take part in this prestigious programme.
“This was an incredible experience of not only enhancing leadership skills, but also forming global partnerships with inspiring clinicians aimed at addressing current global health issues," says Kroon. “The global landscape of health is changing rapidly, and as a developing country, South Africa has the intellectual resources to rise above the challenges which developing countries face and to develop partnerships and solutions for our unique setting."
The 2022 IAP YPL included a leadership development programme focused on analysing models of leadership with the aim of developing an individual action plan for personal leadership growth; visits to various research laboratories in Berlin; and participation in the World Health Summit.
Each YPL participant had the opportunity to present at the World Health Summit during a session entitled 'Effective Leaders for Effective Health Systems'. Kroon, who is involved in a research project to identify genetic variations that may protect people with HIV from tuberculosis infection, presented on the topic of 'Digital Health: A YPL Perspective'.
“In my presentation I advocated for the need of well-defined governance of data, especially with regards to vulnerable population. And I also highlighted the importance of advocacy for the collection of representative data," says Kroon. She explains: “For example, we know that African ancestries are genetically diverse. Due to specific ancestries being exposed to certain environments and pathogens, population-specific disease risk alleles can be associated with specific disease phenotypes. Therefore, we cannot 'copy-paste' models based on European genomic data to African populations. Great strides towards this are being made in South Africa where this need has been recognised and increasingly more research is being done to include historically underrepresented groups."
Her selection to the YPL programme was not the first time that Kroon was singled out for her achievements. In 2019 she was awarded the South African Medical Research Council (SAMRC) Clinician Researcher MD PhD Scholarship in Clinical/Health Research, as well as a European and Developing Countries Clinical Trials Partnership (EDTP) Career Development Fellowship. She also recently completed her PhD entitled 'Neutrophils as effector cells in resistance to Mycobacterium tuberculosis in HIV-infected persons'.
