IDM Roundtable Seminar & Hotdesk

IDM Seminar Program 2025
Hosted by the IDM Mentorship Working Group

19 November 2025 | 13:00 - 14:00
Wolfson Pavilion Lecture Theatre, IDM Building
 

Ed Sturrock is a Senior Research Scholar and Emeritus Professor in the Department of Integrative Biomedical Sciences and a founder member of the IDM. The main focus areas of his research include structure-function aspects of the metallopeptidase angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE), structure-based design of novel ACE and vasopeptidase inhibitors for hypertension and cardiovascular disease, the mechanisms involved in fibrosing tuberculous pericarditis, and the molecular machinery involved in ectodomain shedding of ACE. Together with colleagues in the United States and the UK, he founded a spin-off company AngioDesign (UK) Ltd which focuses on the rational design of enhanced, next-generation drugs for proven disease targets.

Prof Mulder heads the Computational Biology Division at UCT. She is PI of the DS-I Africa eLwazi Open Data Science Platform and co-leads a Sickle Cell Disease Data Coordinating Centre and a Wellcome Trust Discovery Data Integration Platform at UCT. She led H3ABioNet, a Pan African Bioinformatics Network which developed bioinformatics capacity to enable genomic data analysis for more than a decade. Her research focuses on genetic determinants of susceptibility to disease, African genome variation, and microbial genomics and infectious diseases. Her group provides bioinformatics services and training and develops new algorithms and resources for African genomics. Prof Mulder is actively involved in capacity development in Bioinformatics and genomics. She also sits on a number of international scientific advisory boards and is currently the interim Director for the African Bioinformatics Institute.

Kelly Chibale is a Professor of Organic Chemistry at the University of Cape Town (UCT) where he holds the Neville Isdell Chair in African-centric Drug Discovery & Development. He is also a Schmidt Sciences AI2050 Senior Fellow, Full Member of the UCT Institute of Infectious Disease & Molecular Medicine, founding Director of the South African Medical Research Council Drug Discovery & Development Research unit at UCT, and Founder & Director of the UCT Holistic Drug Discovery and Development (H3D) Centre and H3D Foundation. 

Kelly obtained his PhD in Synthetic Organic Chemistry from the University of Cambridge.  This was followed by postdoctoral stints at the University of Liverpool and Scripps Research Institute. 

Kelly’s research interests are in infectious disease drug discovery and the development of technologies to contribute to improving treatment outcomes in people of African descent. 

He serves as Editor-In-Chief of the American Chemical Society (ACS)’s ACS Medicinal Chemistry Letters.