Our People

Dr Helene-Mari Van der Westhuizen

Junior Research Fellow

Postdoctoral researcher, Nuffield Department of Medicine & Nuffield Department of Primary Care

Nuffield Department of Medicine

DPhil (Oxford); Dip in HIV Management (Colleges of Medicine of South Africa); MBChB (Cum Laude) (Stellenbosch University, South Africa)

Dr Helene-Mari van der Westhuizen co-convenes global health teaching at Oxford University on the Translational Health Sciences Masters degree and supervises MSc and PhD students. She also holds a postdoctoral research position with the Centre for Global Health Research in the Nuffield Department of Medicine to conduct a realist review of participatory research methods. After training as a medical doctor in South Africa and working in the rural Eastern Cape, Helene-Mari completed her doctoral research at Oxford University focusing on TB prevention in rural, low-resource contexts. She was funded by a Rhodes scholarship. 

She has experience in using participatory and qualitative research methods, as well as producing different forms of evidence reviews. Her research on Tuberculosis and COVID-19 prevention have been relied on for national and international policy and she has led evidence syntheses for the World Health Organisation on infection control and a case study on TB diagnostics.  

She is co-founder and vice-chair of the Board of the award-winning Tuberculosis non-governmental organisation, TB Proof, which aims to improve TB prevention and care globally. In collaboration with TB Proof she is working on TB implementation projects based in South Africa. She also serves as core group member of the End TB Transmission Initiative hosted by the Stop TB Partnership, an interdisciplinary global airborne infection control expert group, and on the WHO civil society task force for TB. 

In 2022 Helene-Mari received a Fellowship in Global Health with the Rhodes Trust and Global Health Security Consortium in Oxford, where she worked on pandemic preparedness policy and convened a global policy summit. In addition to her research and teaching, she has worked part-time in Acute Medicine in the NHS. Helene-Mari enjoys science communication and has presented her research on live television interviews and podcasts including with the BBC and South African news.