Professor Mahloro Hope Serepa-Dlamini

Prof Mahloro Hope Serepa-Dlamini is currently an Associate Professor and Head of Department: Biotechnology and Food Technology, at the University of Johannesburg. Her research focus is on bacterial endophytes associated with indigenous medicinal plants in South Africa. She holds a PhD in Bacterial Genomics from the University of the Witwatersrand. She joined UJ in 2016 as a Lecturer and was promoted in 2020 to Senior Lecturer and again in 2022 to Associate Professor. In July 2023, she was appointed Head of Department. She leads the Bacterial Genomics and Biotechnology (BGB) research group, which she established in 2017. In 2023, she published and described a novel bacterial species, Bacillus dicomae, which now forms part of the global Microbiology curriculum. Moreover, this makes Prof Serepa-Dlamini the first and currently the only researcher at UJ to have discovered and described a novel bacterial species. Since 2016, she has published 34 peer-reviewed articles in Scopus-accredited journals. As contribution towards capacity building, she has successfully supervised to completion four B.Tech, 17 MSc and three PhD students, and two postdoctoral research Fellows. In 2023, she was selected as one of the top five finalists in the Emerging Young Woman Leader category of the inaugural Higher Education Women’s Leadership Awards (HEWLA), by the Higher Education Resource Services of South Africa (HERS-SA).