Elizabeth is the project manager for the IeDEA-WHO Collaboration since November 2014. This project formalizes collaboration between the IeDEA network and the WHO by defining a core set of indicators and analyses that can contribute in a reliable and predicable way to global ART reporting. Before joining ISPM, she worked at UNAIDS coordinating data collection/dissemination of HIV/AIDS estimates and was responsible for producing summary analyses of the HIV/AIDS epidemic to inform policy and strategy within the organization. She has previously held positions at WHO, UNAIDS and NGOs and has a background in Biology, Environmental Science and Epidemiology. Her current research focus is HIV retention in care.

Gilles is an attending physician at the Department of Infectious Diseases, University Hospital Bern and a senior research fellow. He currently leads several HIV and viral hepatitis cohort projects within the framework of IeDEA-SA and IeDEA-West Africa as well as in the Swiss HIV Cohort Study. He has recently been granted a three-year Ambizione-Prosper fellowship from the Swiss National Science Foundation to study HIV and Hepatitis B coinfection in sub-Saharan Africa.

Lilian holds a Federal Diploma of Commerce and has many years’ international experience in a wide range of administrative tasks. She has been with the University / University Hospital of Bern for more than ten years supporting a Medical Research Group with Grant Management, HR, the sourcing of consumables and all other non-scientific tasks. In addition, she supported two EU-funded research networks as Grant Holder Manager.

Lilian has joined the IeDEA SA team in June 2017.

Eliane is a medical doctor with an MSc in Epidemiology (2015) from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and an MSc in Statistics (2018) from the University of Neuchâtel. Her research focus is HIV-related cancer and oncogenic viruses with a special interest in cervical cancer prevention among women living with HIV. In 2018, she was awarded a 2-year fellowship from the Swiss Cancer Research foundation to study novel cervical cancer screening methods at the University of North Carolina. She spent the first part of her fellowship at the campus in Chapel Hill, USA, and the second part at a cervical cancer screening program in Johannesburg, South Africa. In 2020, she returned to the Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine (ISPM) at the University of Bern where she took over the lead of the IeDEA-SA cancer research group.

Gem is an epidemiologist at the UCT Data Center, currently focusing on research related to pediatric HIV. She has a Masters in Epidemiology from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, an interest in infectious diseases, and has worked as a field epidemiologist primarily doing operational research to address specific challenges in the delivery of primary care to those with HIV.

Patience has recently completed her masters in Medical Statistics from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. She worked on two theses for her masters, one of which has been submitted for publication and is currently under review. The first thesis was titled “Development of a predictive model for loss to follow up and incidence of pregnancy among HIV negative female sex workers among to African cohorts”. This was part of a study taking place in Mwanza and Uganda to establish the feasibility of these women for HIV prevention trials on microbicide and vaccines (PMC3715536). The second thesis was titled “Correction of estimates of retention in care for a Uganda pre-ART cohort: a sample-based approach”. This was a retrospective cohort study that involved tracing of lost patients to establish their outcomes (dead, alive and in/out of care, lost) and merge these with clinic-recorded outcomes. Patience is currently working as a research officer/ statistician with IeDEA-SA.
She is currently working on an analysis of virologic suppression rates in children starting efavirenz-based ART regimens stratified by PMTCT. Patience is also developing a concept on viral load trajectories in adolescents
and young adults.

Nicky is the data manager for the IeDEA-SA South Africa cohort and she has been with the collaboration since 2007. Prior to that she worked as the data manager for the Khayelitsha cohort after returning from the UK where she worked for the Health Protection Agency as a Surveillance Officer for a number of years. She has a nursing background in pediatrics.

Leigh is an epidemiologist and actuary, with a particular interest in the modelling of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections. He has been involved in evaluating the impact of a range of HIV prevention and treatment programmes in South Africa. His work includes estimating the demographic impact of HIV/AIDS in South Africa. He has recently published updated HIV and demographic estimates for South Africa and for each of the provinces.

After completing a Master’s degree in Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, Andreas joined the ISPM in 2012, where he completed his PhD in Epidemiology. His PhD project evaluated the effectiveness of Malawi’s “Option B+”. Specifically, the project aims were to identify challenges to program success, and then to plan and carry-out appropriate interventions.
In 2011, the Malawian MoH developed a pragmatic public health approach to improve the low antiretroviral coverage among pregnant women in Malawi and implemented the “Option B+” protocol. Option B+ provides universal lifelong ART for all HIV-infected pregnant and breastfeeding women, regardless of CD4 cell count and/or WHO clinical stage. Following the national implementation of Option B+ the antiretroviral coverage among pregnant women in Malawi increased from 49% in 2011 to 85% in 2014 and numerous other countries have adopted the Option B+ policy.
In November 2016, Andreas was awarded the 2016 annual SSPH+ Award for the best published PhD article resulting from his PhD: “Retention in care during the first 3 years of antiretroviral therapy for women in Malawi’s option B+ programme: an observational cohort study”,

Lukas is an epidemiologist and international health expert. His research focus is infectious disease epidemiology and molecular epidemiology of emerging pathogens threatening public health, such as nosocomial infections and more recently TB and HIV, at the interface between clinical and molecular data. As the head of the TB research group, he has been leading multiregional projects on TB and HIV within IeDEA, and molecular epidemiological studies on TB/HIV in Switzerland and sub-Saharan Africa. He has a longstanding track record working with large HIV collaborations (IeDEA, Swiss HIV Cohort Study, Collaboration of Observational HIV Epidemiological Research in Europe). During the last two years, Lukas has gained extensive field experience in low-income settings as scientific project leader and TB team leader stationed at the Ifakara Health Institute in

Cam Ha is the Data manager for IeDEA-SA cohorts in Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Zambia and Zimbabwe. She works in close collaboration with the Data Manager at UCT who is responsible for the data management of cohorts within South Africa. Previously, she worked as a software engineer, spending many years specializing in data warehouse reporting within the telecom industry. Since joining the team, Cam Ha has been instrumental in optimizing the performance of the IeDEA-SA data management environment (servers and tools) and at the same time has quickly learned the data management of HIV patients.

Morna has worked in the field of HIV/AIDS since 1992. From 1992-2000, she was Executive Director of the South African AIDS Consortium.  From 2002-2011, she managed CIPRA-SA, a NIH-funded multi-centre study including CHER (early ART for infants). Since 2007 she has been project manager of the IeDEA-SA data centre at UCT, completing her MPH (Epidemiology) in the same year. In 2014 she was awarded her PhD on the evolution and effectiveness of the South African antiretroviral therapy (ART) programme. Morna has a particular interest in the invisibility of men and older individuals in African ART programmes. She is passionate about growing African research capacity. Morna is a Commissioner on the Lancet Commission on Gender And Global Health.

Andrew was co-Principal Investigator of IeDEA-SA from its inception until 2011. During this time, he completed his PhD on the effectiveness of ART in Khayelitsha and in the Western Cape, following adults for up to five years on ART and examining temporal trends over seven years, during a time when ART services expanded dramatically in the province. Andrew currently holds a joint appointment as Associate Professor in the Division of Public Health Medicine, UCT, and as a Public Health specialist in the Health Impact Assessment Directorate of the Western Cape Department of Health.

Marie participates in multiregional IeDEA studies in the field of TB and HIV. She has a background in biology and molecular epidemiology and joined ISPM after finishing her PhD at the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute in 2011, having previously worked as a Research Assistant at the University Hospital of Zurich. Her main research interests are TB, drug resistance and molecular epidemiology. In addition, Marie coordinates tracing studies aiming to understand and improve retention in care among HIV-infected individuals in Southern Africa.

Per Maximilian von Groote is the acting Program Manager of the International Epidemiological Database to Evaluate Aids, Southern Africa (IeDEA SA) research consortium and is based at the Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine (ISPM), University of Bern. Per von Groote worked on numerous projects including research into social inequalities in functioning and disability, rehabilitation systems and services, and international public health policy, and is an executive editor of the WHO Report International Perspectives on Spinal Cord Injury. In these roles he developed an expertise in implementation research, specifically looking at the implementation of WHO global public health recommendations into national contexts. Among other participatory, stakeholder-driven and evidence-based implementation strategy development, application, monitoring and evaluation methods he conducted stakeholder dialogues in many countries including Germany, Romania, Sri Lanka, and Malaysia. He holds a Magister Artium in Political Sciences and History, a Master of European Politics and Government and a PhD in Health Science and Health Policy with a focus on implementation research.

Renee de Waal is a clinical epidemiologist at the UCT data centre. Her research focuses on antiretroviral drug safety, and her recent analyses describe the incidence of, and risk factors for, various antiretroviral side effects and treatment-limiting toxicities.

Veronika is a statistician, working at ISPM since 2016. She finished her PhD in Biostatistics at the University of Washington and has various research interests including survival analysis, causal inference and personalized medicine. She is involved in the statistical analyses for IeDEA.

Julien’s research focuses on modelling the dynamics of HIV transmission and of the emergence of drug-resistant strains. He trained in Paris and obtained an MD in public health and social medicine and a PhD in biostatistics and epidemiology. He arrived at Bern University in August, 2018

I am a clinician with an interest in HIV research. I have a Master’s degree in Tropical Medicine and International Health from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. I have taken a leadership role as part of my research on two large multinational, multicentre cohort studies: one to evaluate targeted empirical TB treatment based on novel algorithms for early TB diagnosis in HIV-positive adults with advanced HIV disease and, another to explore the feasibility of implementing a “Universal Test and Treat” programme within a correctional services setting. My current role is to contribute to research on the impact of substance abuse amongst HIV positive adolescents and young adults and explore measures that might help mitigate those effects. I am passionate about enabling HIV prevention in marginalised communities in the African context and making it a reality.

Kim Anderson is a clinical epidemiologist at the UCT data centre. She has a clinical background in paediatic and adolescent HIV medicine. Her research areas of interest include health outcomes in perinatally-HIV-infected children and adolescents, morbidity in HIV-exposed uninfected children and prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV.

Reshma has a background in statistics, and computational and applied mathematics. Although having worked in a diversity of application areas, she is passionate about their contribution to public health and epidemiology, and spent a number of years developing methodologies and tools related to HIV incidence estimation. Reshma has joined IeDEA-SA as a biostatistician and mathematical modeller.

Wendy has a BCom and an Honours degree in Social Policy and Management. She has been working in the finance and operational side of Clinical Research for the last 6 years and is passionate about Southern Africa and finding solutions to problems.

Kati is a gynecologist by training and has completed her Fellowship with the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. She has learned greatly from diverse clinical experiences in New Zealand, USA, Italy, Switzerland, Ethiopia, and Iran. Cervical cancer screening has been a research interest of hers for some time. The burden of cervical cancer disproportionately affects women living in low-income countries and the high prevalence of HIV in many of these setting contributes to the problem. In August 2021, she completed her PhD with the ISPM IeDEA-SA team on cervical cancer screening in HIV positive women. She now looks forward to continuing some cancer related projects as well as exploring the relationship between sexually transmitted diseases and HIV.

Prior to his 11 years of HIV and TB research in an interdisciplinary academic NGO, Carl has had a rather reticulate scientific career starting with Botany, Biochemistry and Microbiology undergraduate study, a PhD in Botany (Global Change Biology)I and post-doctoral fellowship (Belowground Microbial Ecology and nutrient cycling).   After this he spent a period of time organising conferences and teaching high school science before re-joining an academic unit as data manager for their HIV cohorts.   This role evolved ending up with a passionate interest in the biology of TB transmission.

Joining IeDEA-SA has created new horizons with exciting challenges within large dataset public health research.

I am a reflective thinker who finds the world a curious place and enjoys the creative challenge of linking complex observations together to generate unique answers to problems.

I am enthusiastic about solving challenges involved with data pipelines from different systems with a keen focus on routine data maintenance for various public health systems. My previous experience has been from Agincourt MRC/Wits Health Transition Research Unit, National Income Dynamics Study and the Centre for Actuarial Research. My background is in Demography and Statistics.

Haroon is a medical doctor and actuarial graduate. His areas of interest include HIV modelling and demography, and he recently completed his MPH thesis examining treatment interruption within an HIV treatment cohort in Cape Town.

Amo Lehloa holds an Honors Degree in Audiology. She has several years of experience in group facilitation, lecturing and a wide range of administrative roles in the University of Cape Town. She has recently joined Centre for Infectious Diseases Epidemiology and Research (CIDER) as a project manager in her final stage of completing her Master’s in Public Health (Epidemiology and Biostatistics) at UCT. Her research focus is HIV birth outcomes, maternal health, and infectious diseases epidemiology.

She has devoted her time and efforts outside professional fields towards health services and knowledge dissemination in marginalized communities. She has led stakeholder dialogues in Sustainable development goals engaging Speakers from the United Nations Women’s League Africa, research teams and United Nations Association of South Africa-UCT on Gender equality, good health and wellbeing (SDGs 3 and 5).

Nicolas joined ISPM in 2022 after finishing his PhD at ETH Zurich, where he modeled the effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical interventions during the COVID-19 pandemic.  His main research interests are TB transmission, public health, statistical epidemiology, and Bayesian modeling.

Nathalie is an epidemiologist and environmental health professional. Her research interests are mainly focused on infectious diseases, epidemiology, and implementation research. She has expertise in viral hepatitis, tuberculosis, SARS-CoV-2, and evidence synthesis. She is finishing her PhD in Epidemiology at the Medical School Hannover (MHH) in collaboration with the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI), Germany. She is working at ISPM since 2022 and is supporting Cancer and HIV, Hepatitis, and Tuberculosis research teams.

Orestis is a physicist and a statistician. He received his PhD in Biostatistics in 2017, from the University of Ioannina, Greece. He is working in Bern since 2016, and his research interests are in the areas of evidence synthesis, prediction modelling and personalized medicine. He is providing statistical support for IeDEA projects.