South African Team

South African Team- AHRI KwaZulu-Natal

Prof Janet Seeley

Investigator & Site Lead

Professor of Anthropology and Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, seconded to the MRC/UVRI Uganda Research Unit to lead the Social Science Programme, a post I have held since 2008. Janet is a social anthropologist by training. She has been actively engaged in research on the social aspects of health, particularly HIV and AIDS, since 1987, working in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. Other current research interests include chronic poverty and social protection, internal migration, livelihoods and gender. She has undertaken extended periods of research in Kenya, Uganda, Zambia, India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Papua New Guinea. In addition to heading the social science programme for the MRC/UVRI Unit, where she leads a team of 30 social scientists, she is now working with the Africa Health Research Institute (AHRI) in KwaZulu-Natal as they move into the next 5 years of research funding.

Janet.seeley@lshtm.ac.uk

Dumile Gumede

Site Coordinator

Qualitative Research Operations at the Africa Health Research Institute (AHRI) and her position has both operational and scientific responsibilities. She is responsible for developing and maintaining skills and systems for qualitative and ethnographic data collection methods. Dumile has been involved in both methodological and exploratory qualitative research aimed at identifying possible intervention research, including a) a pilot study on the acceptability of electronic data collection for sensitive sexual behaviour data, b) assessing community perceptions of HIV/TB prevention, treatment and care options, c) to understand health care seeking experiences of people living with HIV, and d) how to optimize the delivery of household contact tracing for TB control. Academically, she holds a bachelor’s degree in Community and Development Studies (2006) from the University of KwaZulu-Natal, a bachelor of technology degree in Business Administration (2010) from Durban University of Technology, and a master’s degree in Social Science (2014) from the University of KwaZulu-Natal. She is currently working towards her PhD studies in Health Promotion focusing on selfcare practices among older people.

dgumede@africacentre.ac.za

Tinofa Mutevedzi

Senior Advisor AHRI

Head, Population Research Platform, AHRI Demographer who has worked at the Somkhele site of the Africa Health Research Institute (AHRI) since 2003 responsible for strategic direction and optimal coordination of research operational support for all population-based research projects, including oversight of the entire Data Centre and the Community Engagement Unit. Tinofa is interested in, and has over 18 years’ experience in designing data collection, data processing and quality assurance and quality control systems for studies ranging from large observational surveys, interventions to clinical trials, as well as training research teams, including in Good Clinical Practice (GCP) and research ethics, using outcomes based adult education approaches. Tinofa previously worked as Research Manager for the Manicaland HIV Prevention Project under Biomedical Research and Training Institute in Zimbabwe and as a Clinical Trials Programme coordinator for UZ-UCSF Research Programme in Zimbabwe. Scientifically, Tinofa is interested in research on adolescent sexual and reproductive health; he is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Witwatersrand, studying social context as a source of social context as source of vulnerability and resilience for adolescent reproductive health outcomes in rural South Africa.

tmutevedzi@africacentre.ac.za