Dr Sue Aitken
Principal (Primary Data Intelligence)
Dr Sue Aitken heads the Primary Data Intelligence Unit, based in Johannesburg, South Africa.
She has extensive experience in public health research, health education and knowledge sharing, programme management and organisational strategy and operational planning. She specialises in disease control, with a focus on infectious diseases, non-communicable disease and clinical research. Her area of expertise includes advising clients on how to structure their data collection for efficiency and rigour, and guiding the PDI team on how to implement projects to unlock value for clients.
Before joining Genesis, she served as a senior scientist at the BARC Clinical Trials Laboratory and research manager at the Ndlovu Research Consortium, where she established efficient systems and guidelines to ensure research met stringent criteria and upheld the highest standards.
As the research manager at NRC, she set up a first class research centre in rural Limpopo, upskilling local team members to work in the centre and conduct valuable research, the main focus of which included the establishment of the Ndlovu Cohort Study.
At Genesis, Sue has been instrumental in developing our clinical research management offering, as well as supporting setting up best practices for project management of large survey data collection. She frequently works across Southern and Eastern Africa, focusing on the challenges faced by health care providers and patients in rural and urban settings as well as supply chain and logistics challenges, the intricacies around treatment and prevention and diagnostics and laboratory testing, as well as the costing and economic challenges for all of these processes.
Sue holds a doctorate in Medicine from the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, a Master's degree in Business Administration from the Gordon Institute of Business Science, a master of Public Health in Disease Control from the University of Pretoria, and a master of Science in Virology from the University of the Witwatersrand. Her undergraduate studies included a Bachelor of Science Honours in Molecular Medicine and a Bachelor of Science in Genetics and Microbiology. Sue also completed a Postgraduate Certificate in Health Economics from the University of York, United Kingdom.
