Paediatrics and Child Health Associate Professor Marieke van der Zalm of the Desmond Tutu Tuberculosis Centre (DTTC) is this year’s recipient of the Female Scientific Leadership Prize for sub-Saharan Africa awarded by the European & Developing Countries Clinical Trials Partnership (EDCTP).

“It has been an amazing honour to get the prize,” says Van der Zalm, who specialises in research on post-TB lung disease in children. “It is an acknowledgment of the hard work of everyone involved in our team in advocating for children and families affected by TB.”

It has been a challenging but rewarding journey since she joined the DTTC – an academic research centre based in the Department of Paediatrics and Child Health at the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences (FMHS) – in 2013.

“I started working on studies that looked at improving TB diagnosis in children,” says Van der Zalm. “We followed up lots of children during the course of their treatment and I started realising that many of them either had abnormal lungs or had problems with their lungs even after completing treatment.

“I started wondering what we actually know about what TB does to the lungs and how we can get a better idea of how to prevent the damage from happening. As far as I knew, there wasn’t a lot known about children after TB, so we started doing lung-function measurements in early 2017.”

Van der Zalm notes: “The [EDCTP] prize has been a very positive reminder that the work that we do is very relevant despite all the challenges that we face, especially this year. Our team is doing a lot of work to support children and families affected by TB.”

The EDCTP, a partnership between institutions mandated by governments in Europe and sub-Saharan Africa, is supported by the European Union (EU) and has played an important role in Van der Zalm’s research over the years.

In 2017, she received an early career fellowship from the EDCTP to investigate the short-term impact of TB on lung health in children. “That’s how it all started,” she recalls. “We were able to set up a cohort called Umoya to improve the diagnosis of TB in children and follow them up to assess lung health.” 

Van der Zalm received a Senior Fellowship Plus from the EDCTP in 2020, which made it possible to look at the longer-term consequences of TB in children. A total of 622 children with presumptive pulmonary TB were enrolled by Umoya between November 2017 and November 2024, and there is a large team currently working on this platform.

In addition, the 2020 EDCTP fellowship enabled Van der Zalm to support a cohort in Mozambique called the INHALE study (linked to the larger Stool4TB study). “The INHALE study is actually a small version of the Umoya study, where we also look at the long-term outcomes of TB in Mozambique,” she explains.

The INHALE project allows Van der Zalm to combine two of her abiding interests – building capacity in other parts of Africa and mentoring young researchers: “I enjoy working with early career researchers and helping them to set up their own career.

“We need to create opportunities for our own people here in South Africa and in Africa in general. We need to make sure that we lead the research on TB and post-TB lung disease.”

In line with this objective, Van der Zalm is involved in multiple collaborations on the continent, including with the EU-funded Decide-TB project to improve TB diagnosis in children and give input into national TB programmes, as well as with training of infant lung function measurements in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

In addition, she is co-chair of the working group of the African Paediatric Lung Function, which supports African researchers who investigate lung health on the continent under the auspices of the Pan African Thoracic Society.

Further afield, she is co-chair of the post-TB working group of the Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease and serves as an expert for the World Health Organisation guideline on TB-associated respiratory morbidity.

And, together with Associate Professor Brian Allwood of the Division of Pulmonology in the FMHS’s Department of Medicine, she co-founded and organised three international post-TB symposiums at Stellenbosch University: in 2019, 2023 and 2025. 

“Those were the first meetings to really start talking about post-TB lung disease,” says Van der Zalm. “We started developing a community of people that is interested in moving this field forward.” 

She is proud of this initiative: “It has grown from strength to strength. We started the symposium by invitation only. This year we had global representation, ensuring that all continents were engaged in the symposium.”

Van der Zalm, who is originally from the Netherlands, always knew she wanted to become a medical doctor: “And I always wanted to improve the health of young children,” she says.

After qualifying as a medical doctor at the University of Utrecht in 2005, she went on to complete a PhD in paediatrics at the same university in 2009: “My PhD was on respiratory tract infections and their impact on the lungs, so it was very logical to move to the TB field and look at long-term outcomes.”

Van der Zalm has very clear research objectives going forward: “My first objective is to improve the early diagnosis of TB. Secondly, to look at the long-term burden of TB – clinical, functional and imaging.

“The most important next steps for me would be to identify blood-based biomarkers that can predict which individual is at risk and to develop interventions to prevent post-TB lung damage.”

Van der Zalm is certainly a deserved recipient of this year’s EDCTP Female Scientific Leadership Prize for sub-Saharan Africa. She is an outstanding ambassador for its mission to enhance research capacity and to accelerate the development of medical interventions that identify, treat and prevent poverty-related infectious diseases.

In addition, she has placed children at the centre of her research. “The post-TB world is very much focused on adults and children are often forgotten,” she says. “We are really trying to make sure that children are included in these initiatives as well.”