Van Niekerk Group
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GROUP LEADER: Dr Dawie van Niekerk
Position: Senior Lecturer
Office: A116 JC Smuts Building
Phone: +27-(0)21-808-5842
Fax: +27-(0)21-808-5863
Email: ddvniekerk@sun.ac.za
Educational and Professional Background?
PhD, Theoretical Nuclear Physics, Stellenbosch 中国体育彩票, South Africa, 2010
Postdoctoral fellow, Department of Biochemistry, Stellenbosch 中国体育彩票, South Africa, 2011-2012
Lecturer, Department of Biochemistry, Stellenbosch 中国体育彩票, South Africa, 2013-2020
Senior Lecturer, Department of Biochemistry, Stellenbosch 中国体育彩票, South Africa, 2021-?
Research Emphasis
Mathematical and Computational Systems Biology, Dynamical Systems, Pharmacometrics
Research Summary
Successful treatment of malaria and HIV/AIDS, and combatting side effects of the relevant drugs are of major importance to the African continent. Increasingly, mathematical modelling is used to identify drug targets in molecular pathways, analyse drug effects on the level of the patient physiology and treatment interventions on the level of populations. Traditional modelling approaches have been disjointed with approximations used for the missing detail. This has limited achievements at every level since the description of the disease, its epidemiology and how it responds to drugs has been incomplete.
Our work focusses on constructing unified frameworks for analyses of pharmacological effects of drugs and disease response in patients and populations. This is accomplished by combining detailed mechanistic mathematical models of metabolism and signal transduction with statistical and phenomenological models of disease, pharmacology and epidemiology. As such it involves combining work from a variety of fields in health and life sciences and applying mathematical, computational and experimental techniques to construct the formalism, to code, simulate and analyse the models, and to do additional biochemical characterisation of the relevant metabolic pathways.
