Discipline of Public Health Medicine

Professor Naidoo obtained her medical degree from the University of Natal in 1992, became a Public Health Medicine Specialist in 2003 and an Associate in the Division of Occupational Medicine in the College of Public Health Medicine in 2010. In 2006 she obtained a Master of Medicine Degree in Community Health from the University of KwaZulu-Natal and in 2011 her PhD from the Institute of Risk Assessment Science, Utrecht University, Netherlands. In 2021 she was awarded the Kofi Annan Fellowship in Global Public Health Leadership funded by Africa CDC and the Kofi Annan Foundation. Her academic career spans 20 years, initially as a lecturer in the Discipline of Occupational and Environmental Health, the University of KwaZulu-Natal in 2003 and now as the Head of the Discipline of Public Health Medicine in the School of Nursing and Public Health in the College of Health Sciences, University of KwaZulu-Natal; a post which she has held since 2015. She is a C2 rated researcher in terms of the National Research Foundation’s rating standard.  Her research interests focus on “Healthcare workers and the risk of their work environments” and “Environmental impacts on women and child health”, “Health systems strengthening” and “adolescent health”. She is the Programme Director of the DS-I Africa-NIH funded grant (2022) “Research Training on Harnessing Data Science for Global Health Priorities in Africa (U2RTW012140)”; a joint collaboration between Harvard University and the University of KwaZulu-Natal focussed on building data science for health in Africa (  https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/dsi-africa/ ). She is the local PI working in collaboration with Oslo University, Norway and collaborators from Greece, Denmark, eSwatini and Mozambique on a European Union funded project (2022) to adapt and validate a novel, spectral screening tool linked to a smartphone for Female Genital Schistosomiasis to improve health care for vulnerable populations (www.fgsnomore.org ). She is a co-investigator on a “Swedish Links Research” grant which aims to build capacity in Southern Africa in exposure assessment during different climatic conditions. It is a collaboration between Sweden, Eswatini, Zimbabwe and South Africa. She is a co- investigator on the ASENZE project which is also a birth cohort study now in its third cycle of funding from the National Institute of Health (USA). This cohort study has followed children in the Valley of a Thousand Hills in KwaZulu-Natal from the age of three and is currently studying early and concurrent determinants of adolescent risk and resilience, that will contribute to the development of effective preventive and supportive interventions in the cohort.  The current study which is led by Professors L Davidson (Columbia University) and C Desmond (UKZN). She has previously lead a cohort project studying the impact of prenatal pesticide exposure on maternal reproductive health and infant neurodevelopment in KwaZulu-Natal South Africa. She was part of the Provincial Steering Committee for the KwaZulu-Natal Department of Health Data Warehouse project seeking to establish a Provincial Health Data Centre to increase the utility of health data to improve patient outcomes by integrating and consolidating person level data from existing core data systems currently in use in KZN. She was a co-PI on the “Optimal Child Growth and Development – Building Thriving Communities through Risk Reduction from impacts of Nutrition, Environment and Social Constructs (OrCHID)” project which is one of the Flagship projects of the University of KwaZulu-Natal. During her academic career, she has raised research funding from national and international sources either as a PI or co-investigator. Her international sources of funding include the National Institute of Health, USA, US AIDS, the South African Netherlands Research Programme on Alternatives in Development (SANPAD), Danish International Development Agency (DANIDA), UK’s Department of International Development (DFID), European Union, while local funding sources include the South African National Research Foundation and the Medical Research Council. She actively participates in undergraduate and postgraduate medical education. She has supervised multiple masters and doctoral students. She has been an active member of the College of Public Health Medicine in the Colleges of Medicine of South Africa since 2003. She has served as a councillor in the College of Public Health Medicine from 2008 to 2010, 2013 to 2015 and 2018 to 2020. Between 2015 and 2017, she chaired the Division of Occupational Medicine as the first female chair of the Division of Occupational Medicine.