Dr Reshma Kassanjee

Research Officer, Safety and Violence Initiative

Research Project(s)

  • Parenting for Lifelong Health

Research Interests

  • Biostatistical methods
  • Infectious and non-communicable disease
  • Healthy parenting and child wellbeing

Biography  

Dr. Reshma Kassanjee collaborates on projects of the Safety and Violence Initiative at the Centre for Social Science Research. She is a Senior Research Officer at the University of Cape Town’s Centre for Infectious Disease Epidemiology and Research (CIDER) and a member of the International epidemiology Databases to Evaluate AIDS (IeDEA) consortium. In that role, she uses observational data from HIV cohorts to inform individual- and population-level decision-making and global policy. She is also involved in teaching biostatistics and mathematical modelling, and student supervision. 

Dr. Kassanjee holds a BSc, BSc (Honours), and PhD in Mathematical Statistics and Computational and Applied Mathematics from the University of the Witwatersrand. She spent her early career developing internationally-used methods for HIV incidence estimation, at the South African Centre for Epidemiological Modelling and Analysis (SACEMA), Stellenbosch University. In recent years, she contributed to the first South African assessments of COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness, as well as COVID-19 outcomes as new variants emerged. Reshma's interests in public health extend beyond infectious disease, and she most enjoys collaborating on interdisciplinary projects that have the potential to benefit those most at need. Highlights include her involvement in the first nationally-representative study of child abuse, violence and neglect in South Africa; the first nationally-representative study of female sex workers; the randomised clinical trial of the Parenting for Lifelong Health for Young Children program; the latest national burden of disease assessment; and an ongoing study on mental health and substance use disorders. 

Recent Publications 

  • Davies MA... Kassanjee, R., et al. Outcomes of laboratory-confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection during resurgence driven by Omicron lineages BA.4 and BA.5 compared with previous waves in the Western Cape Province, South Africa. Int J Infect Dis. 2023 Feb;127:63-68. doi: 10.1016/j.ijid.2022.11.024. Epub 2022 Nov 24. PMID: 36436752; PMCID: PMC9686046.

  • Kassanjee R, Welte A, Otwombe K, Jaffer M, Milovanovic M, Hlongwane K, Puren AJ, Hill N, Mbowane V, Dunkle K, Gray G, Abdullah F, Jewkes R, Coetzee J. HIV incidence estimation among female sex workers in South Africa: a multiple methods analysis of cross-sectional survey data. Lancet HIV. 2022 Nov;9(11):e781-e790. doi: 10.1016/S2352-3018(22)00201-6. Epub 2022 Sep 5. PMID: 36075252; PMCID: PMC9626386.

  • Prinsloo M, Machisa M, Kassanjee R, Ward CL, Neethling I, Artz L, Jewkes R, Abrahams N, Pillay van-Wyk V, Matzopoulos R, Bradshaw D, Pacella R. Estimating the changing burden of disease attributable to interpersonal violence in South Africa for 2000, 2006 and 2012. S Afr Med J. 2022 Sep 30;112(8b):693-704. doi: 10.7196/SAMJ.2022.v112i8b.16512. PMID: 36458361.