Dira Sengwe - Conference Chairpersons

Professor Francois Venter is currently Cluster Head of the HIV Management Cluster, Reproductive Health and HIV Research Unit, and lecturer in the Department of Medicine, University of the Witwatersrand. He is the head of Infectious Diseases at the Johannesburg Academic Hospital. Dr Venter is currently President of the Southern African HIV Clinicians Society, which has over 12 000 members throughout Africa.

Venter has expertise in programmatic HIV implementation, especially provision of ART therapy, opportunistic infection prophylaxis, human resource allocation, data systems and service integration. He has extensive training experience in these areas, and an interest in monitoring and evaluation. He has published several operational research studies. He has been part of several large donor proposal writing groups, and is part of several important South African and regional policy making fora.

Lynn Morris, DPhil is a Chief Specialist Scientist and Head of the AIDS Unit at the National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD) in Johannesburg, South Africa and holds a joint appointment (Research Professor) at the University of the Witwatersrand. She completed her undergraduate degrees at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and received her DPhil from the University of Oxford in the U.K. in 1988. She was Chairperson of the South African AIDS Conference in 2005 and the International AIDS Vaccine Conference 2008 in Cape Town. She was elected to the Academy of Science of South Africa in 2005.