JO-ANN PASSMORE
Dr Jo-Ann Passmore PhD is an Associate Professor at UCT, full member of the IDM, Principle Medical Scientist at the South African National Health Laboratory Service in Cape Town and Research Associate at CAPRISA. Jo-Ann has published >100 published studies in HIV prevention and pathogenesis research involving women in Africa, including both immune biomarker and microbial research approaches to address genital inflammation which drives both increased HIV risk and pathogenesis.

HEATHER JASPAN
Dr Heather Jaspan is an ID Pediatrician MD who set up several clinical trials through her affiliation with UCT and the IDM over the past 15 years, establishing vaginal microbiome expertise within the IDM since 2013. Heather has published a significant number of high impact vaginal microbiome papers in the past 5 years, demonstrating the central role of vaginal dysbiosis and genital inflammation in adolescent and young women. With Anna Happel, Heather will lead analysis of 16S rRNA gene sequencing and metagenomics related to samples from these cohorts.

BRIAN KULLIN
Dr Brian Kullin is an anaerobic microbiologist and Senior Research Scientist working with Jo-Ann at UCT, leading the establishment of the IDMs Microbiome and Anaerobe Core facility since joining in 2018. Brian completed his post-graduate degrees at UCT focusing on developing probiotics for the prevention of kidney stones and subsequently expanding to other gut-associated pathogenic anaerobes like Clostridioides difficile.

ANNA HAPPEL
Dr Anna Happel is an early-career researcher working with Heather Jaspan with more than 5 years’ experience isolating and characterizating vaginal Lactobacillus strains for developing novel treatments for BV (the focus on her PhD and Post-Doctoral research; Happel et al., 2020a). Anna has experience with SAHPRA around conducting a pilot probiotic trial at UCT, completed during her PhD, demonstrating the regulatory pathway surrounding live bio-therapeutic treatment in South Africa (Happel et al., 2020b).

NICOLA MULDER
Prof Nicola Mulder PhD is a IDM full member and heads the Computational Biology Unit at UCT in addition to H3ABionet that will provide the computing infrastructure, training and microbiome pipeline support for this project.

KATIE LENNARD
 Dr Katie Lennard PhD is a Senior Lecturer at the Computational Biology Unit at UCT.

RAMLA TANKO
I am originally from Cameroon and I completed my tertiary education in biomedical sciences at UCT. I joined the MIG lab in 2017 as a postdoctoral research fellow where I am applying my skills in HIV immunology to understanding factors influencing vaginal health and the risk of HIV infection.

I am involved in the following projects: i) assessing the role of Depo-Provera and other contraceptives on genital inflammation and HIV risk, as part of the Evidence for Contraceptive Options and HIV outcomes (ECHO) study (http://echo-consortium.com/); ii) understanding the role of vitamin D deficiency and genital mucosal susceptibility to STIs like HPV and HIV and iii) the development of point-of-care tests to detect asymptomatic STIs/bacterial vaginosis (BV). These projects seek to contribute towards improving vaginal health outcomes and reducing the burden of HIV in Africa.

TANYA PIDWELL
Pidwell,  BSc Hons, is the GIFT Clinical Research Project Manager, responsible for the planning and execution of GIFT. Tanya organizes, and directs the activities  across all Work Packages and ensures synergy at the project level, by meeting Sponsor, UCT and Stakeholder requirements, applicable standards and  regulations, according to time, quality/scope, GCP and budget constraints.