Dr. Nicola Anne Page
Dr Nicola Anne Page (BSc(Agric) Microbiology (UP, cum laude), BSc(Agric) Hons Microbiology (UP), M(Med) Medical Virology (Medunsa), MPH Field Epidemiology (UP, cum laude), PhD Medical Virology (UL)) Nicola Page is a principal medical scientist, leading the Virology Division and currently acting head of the Centre for Enteric Diseases at the National Institute for Communicable Diseases. She also holds extra-ordinary professor positions within the Department of Medical Virology at the University of Pretoria. She is a registered medical scientist (Virology) with the Health Professionals Council of South Africa (HPCSA) and has a C1 National Research Foundation (NRF) rating. She serves as a member of the institutional biosafety and biosecurity committee and recently became a certified biosafety and biosecurity professional. She has authored or co-authored more than 70-refereed articles in scientific journals, worked on the WHO Manual of rotavirus detection and characterization and was a guest editor on the Journal of Infectious Diseases – Rotavirus in Africa supplement. She has presented numerous papers at national and international conferences and meetings and is a principal investigator on projects supported by national and international funding agencies. In addition, she has successfully supervised 16 post graduate students at Honours, Masters and PhD level. Her main research fields of interest are diarrhoeal diseases, the development of molecular techniques for the detection and characterization of pathogens associated with diarrhoea, the monitoring of rotavirus vaccine effectiveness, molecular epidemiology of enteric viruses, evaluation of new enteric vaccine candidates, and development of new data tools for studying the epidemiology of diarrhoea.