Bavesh Kana

BSc Hons, MSc, PhD

Bavesh Kana is the head of the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) node of the DST/NRF Centre of Excellence for Biomedical TB Research, Johannesburg, South Africa, where he studies tuberculosis with a focus on identifying new drug targets and biomarkers to monitor treatment response and risk of disease recurrence. He obtained his PhD at Wits and has worked in several US institutions including the University of Pennsylvania, Texas A&M University, the Public Health Research Institute and Harvard Medical School. Prof. Kana was appointed as an Early Career Scientist of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (2012-2016), one of only two awards made to the African continent at the time, and was selected as one of the 200 top young South Africans by the Mail and Guardian newspaper. Recently, he was awarded the Medical Research Council scientific merit award for outstanding lifetime scientific contribution to health research. He is also involved in the development of next-generation diagnostic verification reagents for quality assurance and verification of tuberculosis molecular diagnostics. Some of the reagents developed in his laboratory are now being deployed in over 20 countries through a spinoff company started by Wits University.