EMERITUS PROFESSORS

Professor Maureen Coetzee Health Sciences Research Office (HSRO)

Professor Coetzee obtained her PhD from WITS University in 1987, and is the recipient of a number of prestigious Scientific Achievements, and Honours, namely: the South African Medical Research Council Lifetime Achievement Award for contributions to Malaria research and control in South Africa (2020); the Lifelong Achievement and Contribution Award (EMBO Conference on Molecular & Population Biology of Mosquitoes and other Disease Vectors, Kolymbari, Crete); and the South African Medical Research Council Platinum Award for outstanding Lifetime Scientific Contributions to health research.

In 2016, she was a finalist in the Standard Bank Top Women Awards, and a winner of the “Distinguished Woman Scientist of the Year L’Oréal Award”, (2015). The John Belkin Memorial Award (USA, 2012), WITS Vice Chancellor’s Research Award (2011), and African Union Kwame Nkrumah Regional Women Scientists Award, Ethiopia (2011), are a few other examples of the high-standing recognition locally and internally her work has attracted. Prof. Coetzee has also been invited as a Keynote and Plenary Speaker at various Conferences and Symposiums.

In the past ten (10) years, Prof. Coetzee has not only demonstrated highly successful granstmanship, functioned in the capacity of an Editorial Board Member, undertaken supervision of Post-doctoral Fellows, as well as PhD, MSc and Honours students, but also further grown her own publication output in excess of 200 publications. Additionally, she has served as the Chair of both the National Health Research Committee of the SA Department of Health, and the Expert Review Group on new generation bed nets for MPAC, and the WHO Global Malaria Programme.

She is a member of the Steering Committees of the WHO Global Vector Control Response working group, and the Gates Foundation Project on genetically modified mosquitoes. In the past, she has featured on the Steering Committee on a number of other WHO Projects (Global Malaria Programme’s Vector Control Technical Expert Group, WHO/BMGF project on impact of insecticide resistance on malaria vector control, WHO/BMGF project vector biology and control). She is a member of Senate within the University since 2008, a member of the DDT Expert Group (UNEP Stockholm Convention, Geneva), the Welcome Trust Public Health & Tropical Infections interview panel; and the Scientific Organizing Committee of the Pan African Malaria Congress (MIM), October 2013.

We congratulate Professor Coetzee on the awarding of Professor Emerita status