Professional Development Activity

My career goal is to contribute to the improvement of healthcare worldwide through research and development of drugs for neglected infectious diseases and chronic metabolic diseases. In addition, intend to continue to impart knowledge to the next generation through teaching and mentoring.

Three years ago, I had set up a short term strategic plan for sustainable research in computational drug discovery and design, using cheminformatics, bioinformatics, machine learning and biostatistics techniques. The following short term plans were implement and some of the objectives were achieved:

  1. To enroll on a course on Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence (achieved).

  2. To strengthen current collaborations and make new strategic collaborations (achieved).

  3. To apply for NRF CSUR grant, NIH emerging leader grant and Wellcome grant (not yet achieved).

To recruit more visionary postgraduate students (achieved).

To organize a workshops on “Chemoinformatics Techniques in Drug Discovery” within South Africa and Africa (achieved).

To write a book on “Chemoinformatics Techniques for Hit profiling and Hit to Lead Development” (not yet achieved).

To write a book on “Pharmaceutical Biotechnology for Biologic Drugs” (teaching and learning strategic plan not yet achieved)


On the long term, I want to achieve the following:


1. Enhance teaching and learning skills: I intend to continue to develop my teaching skills and refining my teaching innovation by attending teaching and learning courses and workshops

2. Expand my research programme for local and international impact: On the long term, I want to position my research group to apply modern computational modelling, data analytic techniques and artificial intelligence on the enormous data generated from all the R&D projects in drug discovery and development globally to design to create knowledge for expedited and rational decision making in healthcare. I will continue to be involved in other projects that is creating knowledge and contributing to the development of AI predictive models that will enhance precision medicine. In the long term I see myself working on expanding my expertise in these areas by a mixture of computer simulations and experimental work. I will also continue to host visiting researchers (including PhD students) from around the world, and continue to send my students on academic exchanges to laboratories in the US and Europe. Through these activities I plan to become recognized by the NRF as an Established Researcher.

3. Organize an international cheminformatics conference at UWC: I have been involved in many of such conferences and I have established productive international collaborations which will enable me to plan an international cheminformatics conference at UWC/Cape Town. I hope to secure leaders in the field as keynote speakers and presentations from researchers and postgraduate students.

4. Increase external research support: I intend to secure at least one US NIH or other international research grant. I am currently working to provide the required preliminary data required for the resubmission of a US NIH grant proposal. I also intend to make applications to the Wellcome Trust, the NRF and MRC to sustain postgraduate and research throughput.