Staff farewells

Dr Hazel Bradley

Hazel Bradley joined SOPH in 2003, having obtained her MPH through the School in 1999. In her PhD thesis completed in 2013 she considered the evolving roles and competencies of district pharmacists in Cape Town’s primary health care facilities. Ensuring accessible, good quality pharmaceutical services at a primary level has long been Hazel’s vision, having worked as a pharmacist in a poorly-resourced setting prior to joining the SOPH. This led her to establishing Pharmaceutical Public Health as an important area of specialisation within SOPH – and she presented several short courses with UWC School of Pharmacy colleagues. She also worked closely with Prof Richard Laing of Boston University and Dr Raffaella Ravinetto from the Institute of Tropical Medicine, Antwerp – and has been involved in various initiatives in Southern and Eastern Africa, focusing on strengthening health supply chain management and pharmacovigilance and regulatory capacity. Always deeply committed to her role as educator, as senior co-ordinator of the School’s academic programme, Hazel valued team work and remaining accountable to her colleagues, while never being afraid to try out innovative ways of teaching and learning as an essential part of professional practice. The many academic and research partnerships that have profiled SOPH within the field of pharmaceutical public health in sub-Saharan Africa is, as Assoc Prof Renier Coetzee of UWC School of Pharmacy suggested, a “legacy of Hazel Bradley”! Hazel will continue to retain research links with the SOPH during her retirement.

Prof Diane Cooper

Di joined the SOPH in 2015, having worked in our sister Department at the University of Cape Town for 25 years where she taught and researched in the Women’s Health Research Unit. Di’s focus on women’s health has included focusing on the social determinants, gender issues and sexual and reproductive health – engaging with issues like contraception, pregnancy and female cancers. More recently, her focus has been on the intersection between sexual and reproductive health (SRH) and HIV, particularly the SRH needs of youth living with HIV and teenage pregnancy. This has involved her internationally – for instance as a member of a Task Team based at Harvard University looking at maternal health and HIV. She has also worked with a number of local and international NGOs. For many years, Di participated in committees of the National Department of Health – and in the province, she was involved in the original rollout of the Termination of Pregnancy and in task teams addressing the integration of sexual and reproductive health and HIV. Di will retain research links with the SOPH during her retirement.

On 26 January 2021 we lost our colleague Sheryl Cordon who, together with Nadia Follentine, looked after the security in the School of Public Health building for many years. Having lost her husband to COVID early on during the pandemic, Sheryl also contracted COVID, developing complications which eventually overwhelmed her. Sheryl had worked at UWC as a campus security officer since 2012 and had been responsible for the SOPH building for much of this time. We all knew Sheryl as a quiet, always helpful, gentle presence in the School, and we miss her enormously.

Assoc Prof Lucia Knight

Lucia joined the SoPH as a senior lecturer in 2015 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2019. She has been very involved in the research aspect of the Master programme, realigning the teaching of research and convening the Qualitative Research Methods module. During her six years at the School she supervised over 20 MPH and two PhD students, and was the Faculty Higher Degrees representative for a number of years. Alongside the opportunities the School provided to grow as an independent researcher, Lucia obtained funding for research, including for some large-scale internationally funded projects. Now at the University of Cape Town where she heads the Division of Social and Behavioural Sciences at their SOPH, Lucia is also an Extraordinary Professor at our School. She maintains three ongoing projects and four PhD students who will continue to completion under her supervision.

Dr Suraya Mohamed

Suraya moved from radiography into public health when she first enrolled in the School’s Postgraduate Certificate in Public Health. After graduating with her MPH in 2005, she joined the SOPH as a lecturer in health promotion, obtaining her PhD in 2015. Suraya’s work has focussed on health promotion. She was involved in convening several health promotion short courses at Winter School and MPH elective modules – and worked on the project on ‘The development of health promoting schools in addressing TB and HIV’. Her PhD thesis was on ‘Factors influencing the implementation of health promoting schools: A multiple case study of three secondary schools in a resource limited community in Cape Town’. This intersectoral project involved a multidisciplinary team from UWC, participants from the Western Cape departments of Health and Education, and the school management, staff, learners and parents from three Western Cape schools. More recently Suraya’s research interests have focussed on adolescent health and wellbeing, including sexual and reproductive health; and she was involved in several international projects including the Global Early Adolescent Study. For several years Suraya was the postgraduate-level co-ordinator in the School, overseeing the Postgraduate Diploma programme in particular. Her commitment to her colleagues, especially in mentoring new staff members, her teamwork and her roles as an educator and MPH student supervisor will be missed by everyone at SOPH.