Professor Alan Christoffels
Professor Alan Christoffels started his tertiary education in 1989 with a BSc in Microbiology and Biochemistry at the University of Cape Town and followed this with an MSc degree in Human Genetics at the University of Stellenbosch. During this time he felt the pull towards information technology and pursued a PhD degree in Bioinformatics at the University of the Western Cape. Upon completion, he embarked on a postdoctoral fellowship with Nobel Prize-winning South African Biologist, Sydney Brenner, in Singapore. He had to overcome negative stereotypes that Africans were not equipped to compete at that level. He did so by offering to develop a web-based query tool, and his research was the only comparative genomics material used in the lab in a Science publication.
He started a research group at Temasek Life Sciences in Singapore, and held an Assistant Professorship at Nanyang Technological University. He was invited to join an international Trypanosomiasis genomics project in 2006, with the goal of sequencing and describing the tsetse fly genome. Here too, he had to fight against the assumption that African students would slow down the pace of the project, and persuaded more senior international collaborators to allow African students the space to contribute meaningfully. In 2007, he joined the South African National Bioinformatics Institute (SANBI) as an Associate Professor, and in 2009 became the Director of SANBI and the director of an MRC Bioinformatics Unit. He also currently holds the DST/NRF Research Chair in Bioinformatics and Public Health Genomics at UWC.
Christoffels has since been actively working towards developing the next generation of researchers. He supervised the only PhD genomics students on the international tsetse genome project, which resulted in six PhD graduates at UWC. To date, he has supervised 14 PhD and 10 MSc students, whose work contributed to computational tools for analysing host-pathogen interactions.
As a co-Principal Investigator of a multidisciplinary project, Christoffels and his team developed a resource kit for schools to assist with tuberculosis prevention. At the launch of the final product in 2013, the Western Cape Education Department agreed to adopt the resource kit and production has begun for distribution to 162 Western Cape schools.
His peer-reviewed publication record includes 41 manuscripts, 13 proceedings, three book chapters, four books, 13 web-based software tools and one patent.
Christoffels has received numerous awards and fellowships for his work, the most recent being the South African Medical Research Council Silver Award for “significant contribution to research capacity development in the health sciences”; a Fulbright Visiting Fellowship at Harvard/MIT Broad Institute in the United States; and the Human Genome Organisation Africa Prize for “leadership and genomics research contribution on the African continent”. In 2011 he was elected a Member of the Academy of Science of South Africa.