Dr. Alvaro Vijoen completed a BSc, BSc Hons. (cum laude) and MSc (cum laude) in Botany at Stellenbosch University (SA). In 1994 Alvaro commenced with a PhD at the University of Johannesburg on the chemotaxonomy of the genus Aloe. In July 2005 he was appointed as a research fellow in the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Tshwane University of Technology (Pretoria). More than eighty post-graduate students have graduated under his supervision since 2002. His research interest is the phytochemistry and biological activity of medicinal and aromatic plants indigenous to South Africa. He has authored / co-authored >250 peer reviewed papers mostly on the phytochemical exploration and pharmacological activity of indigenous medicinal and aromatic plants. He has been elected on to the editorial board of the Journal of Essential Oil Research (Francis & Taylor), Phytochemistry Letters (Elsevier) etc , and he is the Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Ethnopharmacology (Elsevier). In October 2013 Alvaro was awarded the National Research Chair in Phytomedicine a position which he holds concurrently as Director of the SAMRC Herbal Drugs Research Unit in South Africa. Dr Sandasi obtained a BSc (Hons) degree in Biochemistry from the University of Zimbabwe in 2002. She joined the Tshwane University of Technology in South Africa where she pursued studies in Pharmaceutical Sciences and obtained a BTech (Pharm. Sci., 2007), MTech (Pharm. Sci., 2009) and DTech (Pharm. Sci., 2013) in the same field. As a Career Advancement Research Fellow, her research interest is in Phytomedicine with a focus on establishing the quality and efficacy of herbal raw materials and products. Dr Sandasi has vast experience in microbiology, plant metabolomics and chemometrics, bibliometrics, vibrational spectroscopy, chromatography, hyperspectral imaging and in vivo zebrafish husbandry and bioassays in epilepsy. To date, her contribution to the scientific community includes 34 publications in peer-reviewed scientific journals, co-supervision of 5 postgraduate students and 18 presentations at local and international conferences. She continues to serve the scientific community as the Managing Editor for the Journal of Ethnopharmacology and a reviewer for many accredited journals in her field. Gerda completed her BSc, BSc Hons. at the University of Pretoria and MSc (Cum Laude) and PhD in Organic Chemistry at the University of South Africa. She joined the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) as a researcher within the synthetic Heterocyclic Chemistry group. She also lectured in Chemistry at the University of Venda and Tshwane University of Technology. She has been involved in natural product chemistry for more than 25 years, mainly as a scientist in the Bioprospecting Group at the CSIR. Her research work was centered at the discovery and development of drug / natural product leads from the biodiversity of South Africa. This involved scientific investigation of medicinal plants, through interactions with owners of indigenous knowledge, purification, isolation, and structure elucidation of active constituents from these plant extracts. She has six international patents and authored / co-authored > 60 papers on the phytochemical exploration and biological activity of indigenous medicinal plants and the synthesis of organic compounds. More than twenty post-graduate students have graduated under her supervision since 2004 and she is a managing editor for the Journal of Ethnopharmacology (Elsevier). Sandra Combrinck completed her MSc degree (cum laude) at Stellenbosch University and was awarded a doctoral degree in Chemistry in 2007 from Tshwane University of Technology (TUT), South Africa. She joined the Department of Chemistry at TUT in 1994, where she was involved in training students enrolled for Analytical Chemistry courses, over a period of 20 years. She developed an interest in medicinal plants, with emphasis on the phytochemical analysis of plant extracts and essential oils. She has done extensive work on the application of essential oils to postharvest pathogen control of fruits. In 2014, Sandra was appointed as a research professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the same institution, where she worked closely with the Chair Phytomedicine Research Group for five years. The proposed regulation of herbal products in South Africa influenced the research direction of the group, with a shift in focus towards quality control of herbal drugs, to support and encourage commercialization of South African flora. Here she was involved in several studies to document the chemical and biological variation within species used as traditional medicines. Sandra has supervised a host of masters and doctoral students, mostly involved in projects investigating the chemistry and bioactivities of medicinal plants. She has published more than 80 articles in ISI accredited journals. Although she retired in 2019, she is still closely involved with the research group at TUT and serves as a managing editor for Journal of Ethnopharmacology (Elsevier). Dr Vermaak completed her BPharm degree at the Medical University of South Africa (MEDUNSA) in collaboration with Technikon Pretoria (2004) and is a registered pharmacist with the South African Pharmacy Council (SAPC). She is appointed in a permanent position as senior lecturer in the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences at Tshwane University of Technology (TUT) where she is involved in the undergraduate Pharmacy Programme. Her Masters degree in Pharmaceutical Sciences was conferred cum laude in 2009 and she was awarded her doctoral degree in the same field in 2011. Her research interests are focused on the quality control of herbal medicines with a strong emphasis on vibrational spectroscopy including hyperspectral imaging. She has authored/co-authored more than 40 papers published in peer-reviewed high-impact journals and has a current h-index of 18. She has supervised masters and doctoral students and presented her research at various local and international conferences. She is a managing editor for the Journal of Ethnopharmacology (Elsevier), subject editor for Phytochemistry Letters (Elsevier) and serves on the editorial boards of the South African Journal of Botany (Elsevier) and Journal of Biosystems Engineering (Springer).
