Dr Marisa Beretta is a Consultant in Paediatric Hepatology at the University of the Witwatersrand's Donald Gordon Medical Centre, home to South Africa’s largest paediatric liver transplant unit. She completed her MBChB, MMed, and subspecialty training at Wits, becoming a Fellow of the College of Paediatricians in 2014 and sub-specialising in 2018.

An Honorary Lecturer in Paediatrics since 2022, Dr Beretta is actively involved in national transplant and hepatology networks. She serves on the SATS Liver Working Group and is a member of the 29th South African Transplant Society Congress Committee.

Her research includes acute liver failure and contributions to multi-centre reports on paediatric liver transplantation, including as a contributor to the ground-breaking GALA Study (2023). 

As part of the specialist team at Wits Donald Gordon Medical Centre, Dr Beretta contributes to the latest advancements in paediatric liver care for children from across South Africa. She is a passionate advocate for increasing awareness of paediatric liver disease and expanding equitable access to transplantation. Her goal is to represent South Africa on the international stage and help shape the future of paediatric liver transplant medicine.

Professor David Thomson is a Critical Care specialist and a consultant surgeon in the Transplant Unit at Groote Schuur Hospital. He is a lecturer at the University of Cape Town.

David completed his undergraduate medical training in Durban at the University of KwaZulu Natal. He went on to specialize in surgery at the University of Cape Town completing his FCS in 2011, MMed in surgery in 2012 and a critical care fellowship in 2015. He was the winner of the Bunny Angorn prize in Surgical Research and was awarded the Garron Caine Travelling fellowship spending time in Boston, USA at Massachusetts General Hospital, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Harvard Centre for Surgery and Public Health.

He works between the Critical Care Department and the Transplant Unit performing kidney and liver transplants and ICU rounds. He has an interest in promoting organ donation and transplantation. Specifically through education projects and by refining hospital systems to ensure all potential donors are adequately assessed and managed and that the families are appropriately counselled.

Dr. Tinus Du Toit serves as Head of Abdominal Transplantation at Groote Schuur Hospital and holds a key academic appointment in the Department of Surgery at the University of Cape Town. He trained at Stellenbosch (MBChB) and completed advanced surgical qualifications at UCT.

With rich clinical experience—including over 400 kidney and 100 liver transplants—Dr. Du Toit is deeply committed to the science and humanity of organ transplantation. His research contributions span innovative donation models—such as successful multi-organ retrieval from district hospitals without ICUs—and pioneering the first documentation of African kidney transplants using donors after circulatory death.
 

 

Dr Zunaid Barday is a consultant nephrologist at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, South Africa. He earned his medical degree at the University of Cape Town, completing his specialist training in internal medicine in 2001, followed by nephrology training at the same institution.

Since qualifying as a nephrologist in 2006, he has led the hospital’s Transplant Clinic alongside transplant surgeons, including Professor Del Kahn and Dr Elmi Muller. Working within the resource-constrained state healthcare sector, Dr Barday has developed extensive expertise in applying cost-effective approaches to renal transplantation.
 

 

Trained as a moral and political philosopher, Heidi is employed as a Senior Lecturer in Bioethics in the EthicsLab based in the Neuroscience Institute at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. The central theme of Heidi’s work is to think and enact care in the context of the academy.

As a philosopher, this means conceptualising and understanding ‘care’ as an essential component of what makes us human. As an academic teacher, this means thinking deeply about how to structure a bioethics curriculum so that students have optimal opportunities for learning and development whilst also being supported to make sense of the ethics of our world.

As a bioethicist, it means advocating for the integration of perspectives from care ethics into how we think about and address ethical challenges. It also means working alongside healthcare providers to understand the importance of care in addressing moral distress.

Linda Ravenhill is the Founder and Editor of the Medical Education Network. With over three decades of healthcare experience, she qualified in Intensive Care and Trauma Nursing at Charlotte Maxeke Johannesburg Academic Hospital, holds a qualification in International Marketing Management (IMM), and earned an MA in Journalism from the University of the Witwatersrand, where her research focused on medical narratives surrounding end-of-life care in the elderly. 

She worked in clinical publishing with the South African Medical Association before founding her technology and digital publishing company in 1999.
Her work has been widely recognised for its innovation and impact at the intersection of digital healthcare and medical communication. She was a finalist in the 2011 Cartier Women’s Initiative, served as a Ford Global Ambassador, and was a social entrepreneurial candidate for the Wavelength Foundation. In 2016, she was recognised at the Reuters EyeforPharma awards for her contribution to healthcare for the creation of the South African Rare Diseases education platform in conjunction with Sanofi.

Passionate about good clinical science, narrative medicine, and ethics — and how they intersect to improve the quality of care in sub-Saharan Africa — Linda is committed to making complex medical research accessible, relevant, and ethically grounded.