Rate My Professor Michèle Ramsay

Professor Michèle Ramsay is a Professor of Human Genetics at the University of the Witwatersrand, where she serves as Director of the Sydney Brenner Institute for Molecular Bioscience and holds the South African Research Chair in Genomics and Bioinformatics of African Populations. She earned a BSc(Agric), an MSc, and a PhD from the University of the Witwatersrand. Her research focuses on the role of genetics and other risk factors in disease susceptibility, with particular emphasis on genetic associations with complex cardiometabolic diseases and traits, pharmacogenomics, and population genetics in African populations. She has led major initiatives including the Africa Wits-INDEPTH Partnership for Genomics and Environmental Research (AWI-Gen) as part of the Human Heredity and Health in Africa Consortium. Ramsay is the immediate past president of the African Society of Human Genetics and the International Federation of Human Genetics Societies, and she co-chairs the International Hundred Thousand+ Cohorts Consortium. She is a member of the Academy of Science of South Africa and has contributed to capacity development and mentoring of human geneticists across the continent. In addition to her academic appointments, she has received recognition including a Gold Award at the SAMRC Scientific Merit Awards and serves as co-chair of the Lancet Commission on Precision Health. Her work supports precision medicine approaches tailored to African populations through extensive collaboration and large-scale genomic datasets.