Sivuyisiwe Solala is a Cancer Information officer of the Cancer & Infectious disease Epidemiology Research Unit (CIDERU) under the discipline of Public Health Medicine at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Her role within this position includes data collection and abstraction of new cancer cases at selected health facilities, capturing them into an electronic database and ensuring the maintenance of high-level data quality. She has previous experience working as a data collector and clinical research assistant in various public health related projects. She has been involved in HIV research, focusing on HIV linkage to care, connecting individuals who were newly diagnosed with HIV to medical care, ideally within one month to 3 months of diagnosis; she has worked on community based projects looking at various service delivery methods for Antiretroviral Therapy (ART) across the care cascade to better meet the needs of people living with HIV reducing the unnecessary burdens on the health system. She has served part of various clinical trials, doing patient recruitment, screening, and enrolment, providing essential administrative and operational support to clinical research trials ensuring that all activities comply with Standard Operating Procedures (SOPS) and ICH-GCP guidelines.
Ms Solala, holds a Bachelor of Science in Microbiology and Cell biology obtained from the University of KwaZulu-Natal Natal and is currently pursuing a Post Graduate Diploma in Public Health through the University of Pretoria. She has also completed the IARC-GICR e-Learning Series course offered by World Health Organization Academy where she obtained a certificate as a Cancer Registrar. Her interests within the public health space are health promotion at community or population level, managing the burden of communicable and non-communicable diseases, and improving the quality of life through policy, education, and community-based interventions.