Saleem Badat was the founding CEO of the Council on Higher Education in South Africa, after which he was appointed as the first black vice-chancellor at Rhodes University. He then became the programme director of International Higher Education and Strategic Projects at the Mellon Foundation. He has served on various boards and international committees and is the recipient of honorary doctorates from the University of York, the University of the Free State and Rhodes University.
Catherine Kyobutungi is the Executive Director of the African Population and Health Research Center (APHRC), an Africa-based and African-led international research and policy organization headquartered in Nairobi, Kenya. She is also the Co-Director of the Consortium for Advanced Research Training in Africa (CARTA) – a PhD and post-doctoral training program targeting faculty at eight African universities and which has supported approximately 240 PhD and 70 post-doctoral fellows.
Catherine trained as a doctor at Makerere University. She worked for a few years at Rushere Hospital and Mbarara University of Science and Technology in Uganda, before proceeding to her graduate studies at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. There, she obtained a Masters in Community Health and Health Management in 2002 and a PhD in Epidemiology in 2006 shortly after which she joined APHRC.
She is a Joep Lange Chair at the University of Amsterdam. In this professor-level position, she investigates Chronic Disease Management as a new paradigm for making African health systems responsive to non-communicable diseases. She has been a principal investigator on more than 40 projects and authored / co-authored about 145 articles in peer-reviewed international journals.
Catherine serves/has served on several Boards, and expert and technical groups.
Dr. Beatrice Muganda was the Director of the Higher Education Programme at the Partnership for Social and Governance Research (PASGR) before being the CEO at PASGR). Currently, she is the Principal Secretary of Higher Education in the national Ministry of Education in Kenya.