Professor Heather Zar

Professor and Chair of the Department of Paediatrics & Child Health; Director of the SA-MRC Unit on Child & Adolescent Health at the University of Cape Town (UCT).

Heather Zar, the immediate past-President of PATS is Professor and Chair of the Department of Paediatrics & Child Health, Red Cross Children’s Hospital at the University of Cape Town and Director of the SA-MRC Unit on Child & Adolescent Health at the University of Cape Town.  Her work encompassing research, training, clinical care and advocacy, focuses on child lung health.  She’s led education programs for child health including a paediatric pulmonology African fellowship training program.  She’s developed a strong clinical translational research program with several clinical research sites. Her research focus includes pneumonia, tuberculosis, asthma and HIV-associated lung diseases, and an African birth cohort study, the Drakenstein child health study, to investigate the early life determinants of child health and chronic disease. She received the World Lung Health award in 2014.  She is the 2018 L’Oreal-UNESCO Women in Science laureate for Africa and the Arab States.