Rate My Professor Saloshni Naidoo

Professor Saloshni Naidoo is Associate Professor and Head of the Discipline of Public Health Medicine in the School of Nursing and Public Health at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. She obtained her medical degree from the University of Natal in 1992, became a Public Health Medicine Specialist in 2003, and an Associate in the Division of Occupational Medicine in the College of Public Health Medicine in 2010. In 2006 she obtained a Master of Medicine Degree in Community Health from the University of KwaZulu-Natal, and in 2011 she received her PhD from the Institute of Risk Assessment Science at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. In 2021 she was awarded the Kofi Annan Fellowship in Global Public Health Leadership funded by Africa CDC and the Kofi Annan Foundation. Her academic career at the University of KwaZulu-Natal began in 2003 as a lecturer in the Discipline of Occupational and Environmental Health; she has served as Head of the Discipline of Public Health Medicine since 2015.

Professor Naidoo is a C2-rated researcher by the National Research Foundation. Her research focuses on healthcare workers and the risks of their work environments, environmental impacts on women and child health, health systems strengthening, and adolescent health. She directs the DS-I Africa-NIH funded grant on research training in data science for global health priorities in Africa and serves as local principal investigator on a European Union-funded project adapting a spectral screening tool for female genital schistosomiasis. She is a co-investigator on projects including the ASENZE birth cohort study and grants addressing pesticide exposure, climatic conditions, and optimal child growth. Professor Naidoo has supervised numerous master’s and doctoral students, participates in undergraduate and postgraduate medical education, and has held leadership roles in the College of Public Health Medicine, including as the first female chair of its Division of Occupational Medicine.