The University of Cape Town (UCT) proudly hosted the inaugural Health Collaborative Convening from October 15th to 17th, 2023, at the scenic Protea Hotel by Marriott, Waterfront Breakwater Lodge in Cape Town, South Africa.
News and Events
Discover the latest developments and upcoming events of the Collaborative.
Marci Rosecompleted a bachelor’s degree in occupational therapy at The Ohio State University and her master’s at the University of Toronto. She began her OT career at the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry in 1990 where she worked for 15 years.
In 2002, she became the OT in Chief, and then assumed a variety of different management positions at The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. In 2005, Marci became the Administrative Director for the Department of Psychiatry at Mount Sinai Hospital, a role she held until 2012. In 2012, she started the Frederick W. Thompson Anxiety Disorders Centre at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre where she worked as the Administrative Director until formally joining TAAAC.
Her professional passion is for global health work in Ethiopia. She has been an active participant in TAAAC since 2010, first as the TAAAC-OT co-lead, then as the Program Manager and now as the Toronto Director for TAAAC. She has been to Ethiopia on many occasions including as a consultant in the Biaber Project, a 3-year Grand Challenge Canada grant. Marci is a Lecturer in the Department of Occupational Science & Occupational Therapy at the University of Toronto and is the Ethiopian Lead for the International Centre for Disability and Rehabilitation at UofT.
Wilfred Ndifon is Professor of Theoretical Biology and the Chief Scientific Officer at AIMS, a Pan-African network of higher-education institutes dedicated to catalyzing Africa’s socio-economic transformation through advanced training and research in mathematical sciences.
He has made important contributions to a range of topics at the interface of mathematics and biology, including discovering a mechanism that allows flu viruses to escape from antibodies, with significant implications for the design of more effective flu vaccines; a physical mechanism that governs the generation of T-cell diversity via genetic recombination; and a unified mechanistic explanation for the age-old problem of the original antigenic sin. Recently, he led the development of a new mathematical approach to pooled testing, which has produced substantial testing-efficiency gains in field applications conducted in both Rwanda and South Africa. He took his PhD at Princeton.
Kenya 
South Africa 
Canada
Ghana
