Andre Pascal Kengne, MD, PhD
Co - chair
Prof Kengne is a scientist and medical doctor with a speciality in internal medicine. He received his basic and specialist training from the School of Medicine of Yaounde 1 university in Cameroon. He then completed a PhD in Medicine with major concentration on cardiovascular epidemiology and prevention, from the School of Medicine and George Institute for Global Health at the University of Sydney, in Australia in 2009.
He joined the South African Medical Research Council (SAMRC) in 2011 as the first Director of its Collaborative Research Programme on CVD and Metabolic Diseases, and was promoted in 2013 to lead the newly established and consolidated NCD Research Unit of the organization. He holds conjoint appointments as Professor at the Department of Medicine of the University of Cape Town, and Extraordinary Professor at the Department of Global Health of the Stellenbosch University, South Africa.
He is a senior fellow of the George Institute for Global Health (Australia), and the Julius Center for Health Sciences and Primary Care (Holland). His areas of research include chronic diseases epidemiology and prevention in developing countries, decision making in diabetes and cardiovascular diseases. He has been involved in major research projects in these areas in Africa and around the world, including the ADVANCE study, the Asia Pacific Cohort Studies Collaborations, and the Pan-European EPIC-INTERACT cohort study.
He is the developer of the ADVANCE risk model to estimate cardiovascular disease risk in people with diabetes, and pioneer of task-shifting as an approach to improve access to prevention and control of non-communicable disease (NCD) in resource-constrained setting. He has lectured and mentored junior colleagues on NCDs across universities in Africa, Europe and Australasia.
He is author or co-author of over 350 peer-reviewed articles, many book chapters and monographs on chronic diseases in Africa and beyond; that have received over 15,000 citations. His H-index as of May 2015 was around 46-48 and his Research Gate Score at 48.8 (upper 2.5%). He has participated at numerous conferences as speaker, invited speaker, session chair or organising committee member. He regularly reviews papers and grant proposals for several international journals and funding agencies, and is board member of several journals, and associate editor for 4 journals including the leading International Journal of Epidemiology.
He is member of several professional bodies, and leading expert groups including the Global Burden of Diseases (GBD) Expert Group, and the NCD-RisC collaboration, the Expert group on CVD of the International Diabetes Federation, the WHO Expert group on CVD management and CVD risk chart, The Wellcome Trust Population and Public Health Expert Group, The Council on Functional Genomics and Translational Biology of the American Heart Association, the Academy of Science of South Africa. He chairs the Taskforce on Nutrition of the Pan-African Society of Cardiology, and has received several distinctions as a researcher, the most recents being the SAMRC Gold Award for Excellence in Scientific Research in 2013, and the Sir Alberti Award for Excellent in research on diabetes in Africa, awarded in 2017.
