Prof Lyn-Marié Birkholtz

Lyn-Marié Birkholtz is a full professor in Biochemistry and the South African Research Chair in Sustainable Malaria Control. 

She completed her training at the University of Pretoria and at the Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine in Germany, where she also accepted a postdoc fellowship position before being appointed at the University of Pretoria in 2004.   She now also holds a joint appointment with Stellenbosch University  as professor in Biochemistry (2024). 

She served on the Council of the South African Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (2012-2018), is on the scientific advisory board for the South African Malaria Elimination Committee and directs the parasite cluster of the University of Pretoria Institute for Sustainable Malaria Control.  She holds a B2 rating from the South African National Research Council denoting  her as 'Internationally Acclaimed Researcher’  and has been a member of the Academy of Sciences of South Africa (ASSAf) since 2018. 

 She  received several awards, including a Mellon Foundation (USA) and DAAD (Germany) research fellowships; two UP Exceptional Young Researcher awards (2010 & 2013); a UP Exceptional Academic Achiever award in 2019, and a finalist award in the NSTF/South32 TW Kambule Researcher Award in 2021. Recently, she was nominated for the prestigious OMT Harry Oppenheimer Fellowship (2023).  

She is an avid promotor of the power of women in science, and committed to postgraduate training as is evident in a UP Vice-Chancellor’s Exceptional Supervisor Award.