Helishia Dirks

Helishia Dirks, from South Africa, is studying for a Master of Health Sciences in Clinical Technology at the Durban University of Technology. She completed her B.Tech in 2005 and completed an additional BA in Applied Psychology on a part-time basis in 2011. As part of her psychology degree, she also became a registered HIV counselor. She is currently working at Red Cross War Memorial Children’s Hospital in the Neurophysiology Department. 

Helishia’s research centers on finding an early biological marker for diagnosing cerebral palsy in  resource-limited settings where MRIs are not freely available, by examining the link between cognition and sleep spindle density. The title of her study is “An assessment of the correlation between reduced sleep spindle density and cognitive decline in patients at risk of developing cerebral palsy in the Western Cape of South Africa.”

Helishia is a fierce advocate for the rights of children and is currently a custodian of the De Kuilen Primary Care Group. She provides regular food and clothing parcels for 12 disadvantaged families of children attending the school. 

Professionally, Helishia serves as a moderator for the post-graduate Electro-Encephalogram (EEG) course for physicians offered at the University of Cape Town. She serves as an examiner for the EEG technician short course offered by the Neurophysiology Department at the Red Cross War Memorial Children’s Hospital. And she is also a Facility Evaluator on the Board of Radiology and Clinical Technology for the Health Professional Council of South Africa. 

Maria du Toit

Maria du Toit completed her PhD in 2020 through the Department of Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology, University of Pretoria. She received a postdoctoral fellowship from the University of Pretoria in 2022. She is a qualified speech-language therapist working in the academic sector, as clinical lecturer and research supervisor, and in a practice serving low-income families. 

Identification of developmental delays in young children, particularly in low- and middle-income countries, is a major global health challenge. It severely hinders progress towards the fourth Sustainable Development Goal of quality education for all. Maria’s research utilizes innovative technology to make urgently needed decentralized screening possible in communities. Her postdoctoral research builds on her PhD research, by facilitating contextually relevant developmental screening, using mobile health (mHealth) technologies, through local community care workers and early childhood development (ECD) educators. Her focus is on the validation of an mHealth-based developmental screening tool that has been adapted for contextual and linguistic relevance. 

Her main goal is to make developmental screening universally accessible to all community stakeholders working with young children, especially caregivers and ECD educators, to facilitate developmental screening and surveillance and, ultimately, developmental literacy within communities. To help achieve this goal, Maria and her research team have partnered with Kenyatta University to adapt and implement decentralized mHealth-based developmental screening in other low-income African communities.

Maria is described as a highly motivated young academic who enthusiastically pursues the highest standards of work with greatest integrity.

Carey Pike

Carey Pike is a 4th year MBChB student and soon-to-be (2023) PhD candidate at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. She graduated with distinction from the University of Cape Town with a BSc (Hons) degree in Chemistry and from Oxford University with an MSc in Pharmacology.

Carey has worked for the Desmond Tutu Health Foundation as the executive research assistant to the Director, Professor Linda-Gail Bekker, since 2016. It was there that she developed her research interests in adolescent health and women’s health, specifically concerning sexual and reproductive healthcare delivery and HIV prevention. She has experience in designing, delivering, and evaluating health education and empowerment programmes for adolescent girls and young women.

Her PhD will focus on the roll-out of multiple HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) modalities (oral tablets and long-acting injectable and vaginal formulations) to diverse young populations, including adolescent girls and young women, in Cape Town, South Africa. Her project will investigate which modalities best support short- and long-term persistence on HIV PrEP, as well as how to implement a PrEP choice platform in a way that is effective, acceptable to young people and healthcare workers, and feasible to bring to scale. Her PhD will be undertaken as part of UCT’s combined MBChB-PhD programme. Carey plans to become a physician-scientist with a focus on sexual and reproductive health.