Inaugural Wolfson Colloquium a fitting tribute to the Foundation

Showing appreciation: (From left) Dr Max Price, Prof Marian Jacobs and Baron Peter Piot at the first Wolfson Memorial Colloquium.

The Wolfson Memorial Colloquium, held for the first time on 4 September, is set to become a regular fixture on the UCT events calendar.

The colloquium is in acknowledgement of the generous contributions by Lord Wolfson of Marylebone and the Wolfson Foundation to the university, and was appropriately held in the Wolfson Pavilion that is now home to the Institute for Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine (IIDMM) on the university's medical campus. The Pavilion was built with funds donated by the foundation, whose contributions to the university over the years have amounted to over £2 million (R24 million).

The theme of the colloquium, Generating Knowledge against Poverty, was chosen to align with that of UCT's Carnegie conference, Strategies to Overcome Poverty and Inequality: Towards Carnegie 3, which ran concurrently. Speakers at the multi-disciplinary colloquium were chosen to cover a range of health areas relevant to people living in poverty. They included Professor Valerie Mizrahi, director of the IIDMM; Professor Kelly Chibale, director of the Drug Discovery and Development Centre; and Professor Di McIntyre of the Health Economics Unit.

"All of the speakers are researchers whose teams are conducting cutting-edge research with a focus on reducing the burden of diseases associated with poverty," said Professor Marian Jacobs, dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences, who together with Vice-Chancellor Dr Max Price hosted the event.

The keynote address was delivered by Baron Peter Piot, Professor of Global Health at and director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, whose topic was A New Agenda for Global Health.