Dr. Alvaro Vijoen completed a BSc, BSc Hons. (cum laude) and MSc (cum laude) in Botany at Stellenbosch University (SA). In 1994 Alvaro commenced with a PhD at the University of Johannesburg on the chemotaxonomy of the genus Aloe. In July 2005 he was appointed as a research fellow in the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Tshwane University of Technology (Pretoria). More than eighty post-graduate students have graduated under his supervision since 2002. His research interest is the phytochemistry and biological activity of medicinal and aromatic plants indigenous to South Africa. He has authored / co-authored >250 peer reviewed papers mostly on the phytochemical exploration and pharmacological activity of indigenous medicinal and aromatic plants. He has been elected on to the editorial board of the Journal of Essential Oil Research (Francis & Taylor), Phytochemistry Letters (Elsevier) etc , and he is the Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Ethnopharmacology (Elsevier). In October 2013 Alvaro was awarded the National Research Chair in Phytomedicine a position which he holds concurrently as Director of the SAMRC Herbal Drugs Research Unit in South Africa. Dr Weiyang ChenCompleted BSc at the Shenyang University of Pharmaceutical Sciences in 1989, and was awarded a MTech (cum laude) and DTech degree at the Tshwane University of Technology (TUT) in 2005 and 2008, respectively. From September 2008 to August 2011, Weiyang was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the Tshwane University of Technology. Currently she is a senior technician working in the analytic laboratory within the Phytomedicine research Group at TUT. Her professional experience is in liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry systems spanning a wide variety of applications from method development, optimisation, validation and preparative LC-UV-MS. Weiyang has authored / co-authored 59 peer reviewed. Miss Nduvho Mulaudzi was born in 1994 in the Limpopo province of South Africa. She obtained her National Diploma and Bachelor of Technology degree in analytical chemistry from the Vaal University of Technology in South Africa. She joined the Tshwane University of Technology in 2017 as an academic intern within the Phytomedicine Research Group in the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences. Miss Mulaudzi has completed her Masters in Pharmaceutical Sciences degree on a project focusing on the phytochemical profiling of indigenous South African medicinal plants using high performance liquid chromatography (HPTLC) techniques. Her main research interest is in the application of analytical techniques such as chromatography and spectroscopy in the quality control of natural products. Dr Guy Kamatou is a technologist at Tshwane University of Technology (South Africa). Having obtained his BSc and Hons degrees at Dschang University (Cameroon), Dr Kamatou joined the University of the Witwatersrand and obtained his MSc (Resource Conservation Biology) degree in 2003 and then completed his PhD in 2006 at the same Institution. From 2007 until 2010, Dr Kamatou was offered a postdoctoral research fellowship. He authored and co-authored 62 papers in accredited journals. He has presented his research work at several national and international conferences and supervised/co-supervised 12 Master and 4 Doctorate students. Dr Kamatou was responsible for establishing the GC-MS and GCxGC-ToF-MS research platform in the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences at TUT. He is a reviewer of various manuscripts submitted to various international journals. His expertise and research specialisation focuses on quality control of essential oils and herbal products; medicinal plant chemistry, chromatography, biological activities and isolation of active constituents. Dr Sandasi obtained a BSc (Hons) degree in Biochemistry from the University of Zimbabwe in 2002. She joined the Tshwane University of Technology in South Africa where she pursued studies in Pharmaceutical Sciences and obtained a BTech (Pharm. Sci., 2007), MTech (Pharm. Sci., 2009) and DTech (Pharm. Sci., 2013) in the same field. As a Career Advancement Research Fellow, her research interest is in Phytomedicine with a focus on establishing the quality and efficacy of herbal raw materials and products. Dr Sandasi has vast experience in microbiology, plant metabolomics and chemometrics, bibliometrics, vibrational spectroscopy, chromatography, hyperspectral imaging and in vivo zebrafish husbandry and bioassays in epilepsy. To date, her contribution to the scientific community includes 34 publications in peer-reviewed scientific journals, co-supervision of 5 postgraduate students and 18 presentations at local and international conferences. She continues to serve the scientific community as the Managing Editor for the Journal of Ethnopharmacology and a reviewer for many accredited journals in her field.
