Prof IJsselmuiden currently is Professor of Epidemiology and Director of the School of Health Systems and Public Health at the University of Pretoria, South Africa, where he has been based since October 1995

PERSONAL

In 1954, Prof IJsselmuiden was born in Winterthur, Switzerland, from where he moved to the Netherlands, from there to Curaçao, then back to the Netherlands, and started with his medical studies in Antwerp, Belgium in 1973. He graduated as MD from the Erasmus University in Rotterdam, Holland, in January 1980. Prof Ijsselmuiden is a Permanent Resident of South Africa. Prof IJsselmuiden is married to Joëlle, his better half since 1980, and together they have three children.

QUALIFICATIONS

In September 1980, he started working as a general medical practitioner at the Elim Hospital, a 550-bed general hospital in the northern Province in South Africa. This was and is the poorest part of South Africa, and he joined a team of 5 doctors serving a population of approximately 250.000 persons. Although mostly engaged in clinical activities during the first year, the remaining 6 years were mostly spent in public health and general development work. For his work to understand the cultural aspects of measles disease, he received the Noristan Prize & Medal 1983 for the best original contribution by a general practitioner in Southern Africa published during a calendar year in any recognised Southern African Medical Journal.

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

In 1987, he moved to the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg to complete his four-year specialisation in Community Health. At the end of his specialisation he received the W.Harding Le Riche Medal 1987 of the University of the Witwatersrand for outstanding work in Epidemiology. He left at the end of 1988 to become Deputy Medical Officer of Health for the city of Johannesburg until June 1990, where his main work focussed on a city-wide HIV/AIDS prevention plan, the development of a management information system, and control of environmental health problems. He left to pursue a MPH degree at the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health in Baltimore during 1990-1991, and returned to South Africa to take up the position of senior lecturer in the Department of Community Health at the Medical University of Southern Africa (MEDUNSA). During this time, he developed the South African curriculum for the MPH degree, and focussed his research activities on the ethics of HIV/AIDS research in developing countries, and on infectious disease and nutritional epidemiology. For his entire work in the field of public health, he was awarded the biennial CHASA/LENNON Award 1994 for outstanding achievement in the field of comprehensive health in southern Africa, by the Community Health Association of Southern Africa. In October 1995, he was appointed as Professor and Head of the Department of Community Health at the University of Pretoria, where he developed the concept of a university-wide, "horizontal" programme in public health, now known as the School of Health Systems and Public Health. In April 1999, he was appointed the first director of this School. As an epidemiologist, he has been shifting his interest to chronic disease and environmental epidemiology. To reinforce this, he spent a 6-months sabbatical study leave at the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) in Lyon, France, during 1998, which awarded him the 1998 Visiting Scientist Award.

PUBLICATIONS

Prof IJsselmuiden has authored and co-authored over 80 published papers and chapters in books, serves as associate editor for the Southern African Journal of Epidemiology and Infection, and reviewer for several local and international journals and publishers.

ACADEMIC INTERESTS

His main academic interests at present are educational (establishment of inter-disciplinary education and research programmes in public health, particularly in health care development and environmental health) and epidemiological (establishment of a large, multi-disciplinary research group focussing on health and the environment from the perspective of developing countries).

Return to Participants page