One front door to health research at Wits.
Find, fund, govern and measure Faculty research capability — from equipment and datasets to expertise, grants, outputs and compliance, all in one connected place.
Six ways into the hub
Equipment is the most visible entry point, but every part of the research operation has its own front door.
Equipment Lead
Search, book and manage 140+ instruments and core facilities — availability, training, recharge and usage.
Browse catalogueData
Deposit, find and cite datasets with local persistent IDs and controlled access for sensitive health data.
Open repositoryPeople Federated
Find researchers and staff by expertise — profiles drawn live from the Wits Research Visibility Platform.
Find expertiseUnits
Schools, departments, centres, institutes and facilities — each a living organisational profile.
Browse unitsFunding
Live grant tracker, AI funding matcher and AI-assisted pre-award support through to clean closeout.
Open workspaceDashboards
Sign in with Wits to reach role-aware operational tools — bookings, approvals, reporting and oversight.
Sign inA look inside the Faculty
Illumina NovaSeq 6000
High-throughput sequencing in the Genomics Core — free to book this week.
Gauteng PHC waiting-time cohort
Open dataset, 2025 — operational data from primary healthcare facilities.
School of Public Health
142 researchers, R20M+ active grants, 8 core facilities, 214 postgraduates.
Three experiences, one connected hub
The same research ecosystem, presented three ways depending on who you are and what you're doing — a public shop window, a discovery workspace, and an authenticated operational layer.
Markets the Faculty's research capability to the world. Answers: what research and facilities exist here?
- Faculty overview & research themes
- Featured facilities & datasets
- Schools, centres & departments
- Latest publications & success stories
- Public equipment catalogue
A search drops you into a discovery workspace — closer to OpenAlex or Dimensions than a homepage.
- Unified results: equipment, data, people
- Publications, projects, funding, centres
- Filters and rich previews
- AI semantic search across the graph
- The search becomes the workspace
Authentication unlocks the personalised, role-aware tools. These are operational, not discovery.
- Bookings, deposits & approvals
- Grant tracking & reporting
- Supervision & finance
- Facility management & recharge
- Role-based dashboards (below)
What this is
A connected access layer that sits on the Faculty website and links existing systems, people, equipment, datasets, grants and support workflows — one front door to research capability across FHS.
What this is not
Not another standalone website, and not a replacement for the Visibility Platform, HREC portal or finance systems. It federates to those systems of record rather than duplicating them.
Ambitious in vision, controlled in delivery
The full ecosystem is shown here to convey the destination. Delivery is staged — discovery first, then operations, then the automation layer.
Faculty Research Discovery Hub
The public shop window and search — no authentication required.
- Equipment search & public catalogue
- Unit & researcher profiles
- Public landing pages & support directory
Operational workflows
Authenticated tools via Wits SSO. Requires integration with institutional systems.
- Equipment booking & data deposit
- Grant tracker & role-based dashboards
- Approvals & reporting workflows
AI & automation layer
The enabling layer, added once the connected data is flowing.
- Funding matching & recommendations
- AI summaries, alerts & metadata
- Automated cross-linking across the graph
A research operations hub, not a directory
The value is visibility, coordination, access and accountability. AI sits underneath, improving search, matching and summaries — it isn't the point of it.
Shared equipment found and booked in a click, with training and cost recovery built in.
Utilisation visible, bottlenecks forecast, duplicate purchases avoided across the faculty.
POPIA-aligned access, ethics linkage and audit trails wherever sensitive data moves.
Leadership sees ROI, pipeline and capacity across all schools and cores in one place.
Underneath: one connected knowledge graph
Every entity links to every other. That connected graph is what makes search, dashboards, recommendations, AI and reporting feel intelligent rather than merely searchable.
Got data, an instrument, or a proposal in the works?
Zeiss LSM 980 Confocal
Nikon A1R Confocal
TB granuloma confocal image set, 2024
Dr P. Khumalo
Confocal imaging of host–pathogen interaction in TB
Imaging & Microscopy Core
A complete core-facility system, not just a list
Browse, book, train, track and recharge across every shared instrument in the faculty — scheduled-vs-actual usage, cost recovery against grants, and access gated on training. The full core-facility toolset, hosted locally under institutional control.
Min/max reservation windows, time-steps, no-show release, walk-up bookings and waitlists per instrument.
Scheduled-vs-actual logged time at a kiosk station; optional interlock gates power/software to authorised users.
Internal/external rates, add-on consumable charges, cost-tracking against project IDs, invoices to the finance system.
Bookings gated on completed training and valid certification; sensitive/containment equipment restricted by role.
Barcoded inventory, sample location, container/consumable management and chain-of-custody for biobank holdings.
Usage, downtime, recharge capture and ROI per instrument and per core — exportable for the deputy dean's reviews.
Outputs that used a facility link back to it automatically — evidence of each core's contribution to the faculty's research.
Predicts bottlenecks, flags under-used assets and suggests scheduling that lifts utilisation across the faculty's shared instruments.
Covers the core-facility capabilities the faculty needs
Searchable equipment, booking, training requirements, access rules, usage reporting and cost recovery — with these functions linked to faculty profiles, grants, datasets and research outputs, hosted locally under institutional control.
Illumina NovaSeq 6000
Overview
High-throughput short-read sequencing platform for whole-genome, exome and targeted panels. Supports large-scale population genomics and pathogen surveillance across the Faculty. Operated by the Genomics & Sequencing Core under custodian supervision; certification and a valid reservation are required before use.
Booking & access rules
Connected through the hub auto-linked
Availability
Specifications
Maintenance
Sensitive health data, shared safely
Persistent IDs minted locally for sovereignty, rich metadata for reuse, and a controlled-access workflow that checks ethics before anything is released.
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Ethics, linked not stored
Each record carries its HREC reference, status and expiry, deep-linked to the Wits HREC portal ↗. Release is gated on a valid approval.
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Local persistent IDs
ARK or self-hosted Handle PIDs by default for data sovereignty — with DOIs registered on demand for datasets headed into the literature.
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POPIA-aligned access control
Data-sovereignty rules and consent scope checked at the point of release; controlled-access requests routed, approved and audited with a full trail.
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Metadata that travels
Standards-aligned descriptions keep datasets harvestable by global aggregators without surrendering control of the data itself.
Find researchers and staff
Profiles are drawn live from the Wits Research Visibility Platform. The hub adds operational context — roles, group membership, equipment custodianship — and gives professional staff a profile too.
Prof. Aletta Millen
Research summary AI-generated
Aletta Millen is a cardiovascular and neuroinflammation researcher whose work centres on the systemic consequences of chronic inflammation. Using well-established rodent models, her research explores how inflammatory pathways driven by cytokines such as TNF-α and IL-6 contribute to cardiac remodeling, ventricular dysfunction, and heart failure phenotypes. Her studies integrate molecular biology, echocardiography, and mass spectrometry imaging to elucidate mechanisms linking immune activation to structural and functional cardiac changes.
A major focus of her scholarship is the role of inflammasome activation, cytokine blockade, and microRNA regulation in inflammation-induced cardiac injury. Her work has clarified how TNF-α mediates early systolic dysfunction and myosin isoform shifts, while IL-6 signalling shows complex, context-dependent effects on lipid metabolism, fibrosis, and ventricular performance — contributing to a nuanced understanding of biologic therapies in autoimmune and hypertensive disease models.
Millen has also advanced research on neuroinflammation and mood disorders, examining HPA axis dysregulation, monoamine alterations, and neurotrophic signalling in inflammatory states. Her contributions extend to translational perspectives on depression treatment in African contexts, including the therapeutic promise of ketamine. Collectively, her work bridges cardiovascular pharmacology, immunology, and neurobiology.
Expertise & methods
Latest publications
Connected through the hub auto-linked
Role
Bibliometrics
Identifiers
Five schools, one research surface
Output, data and infrastructure roll up by school and by cross-cutting theme — HIV/TB, NCDs, health systems, genomics.
School of Public Health
Overview
One of five schools in the Faculty of Health Sciences, spanning epidemiology, health systems, health policy and biostatistics. The School anchors several flagship cross-cutting programmes and operates a portfolio of core facilities shared across the Faculty.
Research themes
Connected through the hub live
Performance
Template note
The same profile template serves a Department, Research Centre, Institute (e.g. Sydney Brenner Institute), Programme, Unit, Laboratory or Core Facility.
From opportunity to award, tracked end-to-end
Discovery, portfolio tracking and pre- to post-award in one workspace — with an AI matcher that scores every open call against the faculty's expertise and a clean handoff to the Wits Research Office for submission.
Discovery Research Awards
Self-Initiated Research Grant — Cardiovascular
Grand Challenges — TB Diagnostics
Thuthuka Funding Instrument
Grant portfolio & tracking
Every active award with spend, milestones and AI monitoring — cross-linked to the people, data and equipment it touches.
Calls matched to your work
Scored against faculty expertise, eligibility and past outputs.
Pre-award support · AI-assisted, human-approved
Five assisted stages, then a clean handoff to the Research Office system of record. Nothing is submitted in the institution's name without sign-off.
Discover
Calls scanned against faculty expertise and scored for fit and eligibility.
AI matchDraft
First-draft narrative and budget built from prior outputs and the call text.
AI draftingEvidence
Supporting literature and stats pulled from the corpus, with sources attached.
AI synthesisCritique
A reviewer's-eye pass against the funder's published criteria flags the gaps.
AI reviewRoute
Internal sign-off — HoD, finance, research office — then handoff to submission.
Awards managed through to clean closeout
Benchmark hubs stop at guidance. This carries each award through contracts, reporting deadlines, milestone sign-off and finance reconciliation — to the closeout the faculty is accountable for.
Sign in once with Wits, get a dashboard shaped to your role
This is the third experience — the authenticated layer. Staff use their existing Wits single sign-on, no new account. The hub holds only operational context against each identity; the academic profile stays in the Visibility Platform. Pick a role to see the difference.
Training and supervision, not just a course catalogue
The most common feature across benchmarked hubs — here it runs on the university's own approved LMS. Methods courses, research training and live supervision tracking are delivered through Ulwazi, the Wits Canvas-based learning platform already used across the institution.
Stepped-wedge & cluster trials
Design, power calculation and analysis for pragmatic health-systems evaluations.
POPIA & health data governance
Consent, de-identification and controlled access for human-subjects data.
Scientific writing & publishing
From first draft to submission, with science-editing support built in.
Grantsmanship & proposal craft
Funder logic, budgets and narrative — feeding straight into the pre-award portal.
Supervision tracker
Research support directory
The human layer the benchmark hubs do well — surfaced as a directory, federated to the people who actually deliver it.
Manuscript editing and language support before submission.
Book a consult →Study design, sample size and analysis consults.
Request support →Systematic reviews and rapid evidence, corpus-assisted.
Start a review →Contracts, costing and submission — federated contacts.
Find your officer →AI improves the hub — it isn't the point of it
The value is visibility, coordination, access and accountability. AI sits underneath that, doing the heavy reading: better search, matching, metadata, summaries and alerts — so people spend time on judgement, not data entry.
Harvest & link
New outputs, grants and deposits auto-ingest, then self-tag and cross-link people, projects and datasets via webhooks.
Metadata & summaries
Draft DataCite-aligned metadata, codebooks and plain-language abstracts generated from uploaded files, ready for review.
Funding & collaborators
Calls scored against faculty expertise; partner and reviewer suggestions surfaced from co-authorship and topic graphs.
Evidence on demand
A retrieval assistant grounded in the FHS corpus answers questions and assembles evidence with sources attached.