Associate professor Rod Dawson is the Managing Director of the University of Cape Town Lung Institute (UCTLI). He is also the Clinical Research Unit Head of the Centre for Tuberculosis Research Innovation (CTBRI) at the UCTLI. Prof Dawson is a Consultant Pulmonologist and holds the position of Honorary Senior Consultant in the Division of Pulmonology Department of Medicine at the University of Cape Town. He was elected to the Board of the UCT Lung Institute in 2012 and was appointed Managing Director of the UCTLI since 2016.
The Centre for Tuberculosis Research Innovation was established by Prof Dawson in 2008 and is now established as a leading high volume research site for investigational studies for new drugs in TB and HIV, having conducted more than 30 pivotal TB treatment studies. Prof Dawson’s main research interests are: New TB drug development, Counselling interventions to improve compliance in Drug resistant TB (DR-TB), Standardized chest radiography reading and Interventional TB and HIV cohort studies. Prof Dawson has established an extensive collaborative research network and manages two prospective research cohorts including the “Longitudinal Pulmonary HIV” and the “TB Bio-storage” cohorts, that have established the basis of a novel self-funded research program which has supported 2 PhD students. He has published 54 manuscripts in PubMed-listed international peer reviewed journals. Prof Dawson’s total citation count on 1st May 2017 is 1976 with a Scopus h-Index of 26.