Awelani Mutshembele
Dr. Mutshembele is a Specialist Scientist who joined the Tuberculosis Platform of SAMRC, South Africa as an Intramural Postdoctoral Research Fellow in 2017. She has a strong background in Biotechnology, Plant Pathology, and Molecular Biology: In 1998 she obtained a National Diploma in Biotechnology from Durban University of Technology, South Africa. She worked as an assistant while studying towards her Master degree in Microbiology at the University of Venda, South Africa, and PhD degree in Zoology at University of the Free State in 2016. Between 2016-2018, she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. She has more than 10 years experience in Molecular Biology (DNA extraction, Bacteria, Primer design, Sanger and Illumina Sequence assembly) and Genomics. Her current research interest is the molecular epidemiology of Mycobacterium TB. She published a number of related publications in scientific indexed, peer reviewed journals such as International Journal of Medical Microbiology. She received a research grants from the National Research Foundation (NRF) South Africa for the project 'The role of region-specific SNPs in virulence genes in Mycobacterium tuberculosis drug resistance” (2018-2020).