About the specialist

With a career spanning nearly 3 decades, and combining clinical medicine with computational approaches, Dr Deffur has developed a unique view of human health.

Training in medicine and internal medicine, he witnessed the dual HIV and TB epidemic in South African public hospitals. This motivated him to qualify in infectious diseases, a medical field that recently was much publicised during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In additional to working in the public and private healthcare sectors as well as overseas, Dr Deffur also spent time in academia, obtaining a PhD at UCT while working on the immunology of tuberculosis and HIV. He closely collaborates with a specialised unit the UCT Neuroscience Institute (https://health.uct.ac.za/coin/partners).

In addition, Dr Deffur has significant experience in human genomics and digital health. As the first clinician to complete comprehensive training in bioinformatics in 2007, he has since then worked on ways to integrate genomics with clinical medicine. In working in the digital health space, he is uniquely positioned to translate the benefits of continuous health monitoring provided by wearable devices into improved patient care.

Qualifications

MBChB (Pretoria, 1995)

Diploma in Tropical Health (Pretoria, 1997)

MMed(IntMed) (Pretoria, 2006)

CertID(SA)Phys (Cape Town, 2010)

PhD (Cape Town, 2013)