Choonara Yahya

Professor Yahya Choonara is internationally recognised as an outstanding global pharmaceutical scientist working for 16 years at the forefront of the pharmaceutical sciences to produce advanced life-saving medicines that have an impact on global health (i.e. the best science for infectious, hereditary and lifestyle diseases). A Pharmacist by profession, in 2007 he co-founded the University of Witwatersrand’s Wits Advanced Drug Delivery Platform (WADDP) Research Unit, Africa’s largest Research Unit in its domain. Based in a Lower/Middle-Income Country (LMIC) he has contributed enormously to basic and translational pharmaceutical research focusing on intellectual property in the design of novel drug delivery systems, nanomedicines, functional biomaterials and regenerative medicine to produce 21st Century patient-centric medicines for disease prevention/treatment and has over 338 ISI-accredited publications to his name. Professor Choonara is a Personal Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences in the University of Witwatersrand’s Department of Pharmacy and Pharmacology and the Director of the WADDP Research Unit, one of the flagship research units of Wits University.