BONUS: Stronger Together — The Future of Global Health Partnerships with Dr. Wim de Villiers

• How student and faculty exchanges expanded into a multi-disciplinary hub bridging research, education, and community engagement.
• The importance of investing in research capacity within South Africa to address local and global health concerns.
• Why gatherings like the Hub Conference are critical to fostering long-term, sustainable institutional trust.

[00:00:00] Dr. Rob Murphy: Welcome to the Explore Global Health Podcast. I'm Dr. Rob Murphy, executive director of the Havey Institute for Global Health here at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. Welcome to a special edition of Explore Global Health, coming to you from the 2026 Stellenbosch University–Northwestern University Global Health Knowledge Hub Conference being held here at Northwestern University in Chicago. The hub builds on more than two decades of partnership between our two institutions, creating a framework to bring together faculty, researchers, and students for collaborative research, education, and community engagement. Its work spans five key areas: global primary care, biomedical engineering, health professions education, infectious diseases and genomics, and climate health and environmental engineering. Joining me today is Professor Wim de Villiers, former rector and vice-chancellor of Stellenbosch University. We're going to discuss how this bidirectional partnership evolved, what makes a collaboration like this succeed, and what Northwestern and Stellenbosch can accomplish together in the years ahead. Professor de Villiers, welcome.

[00:01:11] Dr. Wim de Villiers: Thank you very much, Rob. It's a pleasure joining.

[00:01:13] Dr. Rob Murphy: Stellenbosch is one of Africa's leading research universities, doing work with implications far beyond the continent. During your time as rector, Stellenbosch made major investments in becoming a research-intensive university with a global reach. What was the vision behind building that kind of research capacity in South Africa?

[00:01:32] Dr. Wim de Villiers: Yeah, thank you very much, Rob. It's a pleasure to chat with you regarding Stellenbosch's role as a research-intensive university on the African continent. So I served as rector and vice-chancellor at the university from 1st of April 2015, April Fools' Day, until the 31st of March 2025—two five-year terms. I think it's important to preface my remarks by reminding listeners that I'm actually a gastroenterologist, so I'm a clinician-scientist with an interest in chronic inflammation of the gut. So that's very dear to my heart. So I tried to emphasize four areas of strategic interest during my term, and the first was—and so it is about being a research-intensive university. Of course, all universities will all say we want to be excellent. I mean, there's nothing to be gained from that, but to be research-intensive and to be truly focused on research, it's something a little bit different because it's what type of research, whom do you do it for, and who participates, and the whole question of equitability of research as well, especially as a university that's located in Africa. So I use the phrase that the research that we do at Stellenbosch University has to have some local relevance, has to be regionally impactful, but it's globally competitive, so we can hold our own with the best of the rest. So that was the first one. The second one is internationalization. So I spent a long time in the United States, I spent a long time in the United Kingdom, so I realized how important it is that we develop our knowledge and the research knowledge, that it's an international endeavor. We can't do these things in silos anymore and on our own. And I think 10 years ago or in 2015, that seemed to be quite self-evident, internationalization. But it has become slightly more contentious over the last period of time, and so that is why I am especially grateful to Northwestern University's continued support in this regard. The third element that I thought would be very important to help us drive this mission forward to become actually the top research-intensive university in Africa in 2040 is philanthropy, to explore other avenues, other revenue streams for university funding because, frankly, we used to be very dependent on the government for funding. We're a public university, but yeah, I'm on record as saying that the government is fairly unreliable. It's a difficult, difficult environment. And so I really spent a lot of time and effort on that. So I regarded myself as a chief fundraiser for the university, and I sort of embraced that role. That's probably that I brought back to South Africa from an American experience. I'm not shy about asking people for money for worthwhile causes. It's really important. And the fourth one—and that is perhaps more applicable to the South African context—is an emphasis on transformation. Now, what does transformation mean? Now to the rest of the world, transformation just means change. And yes, of course, universities must always change. It's never a complete product. We need to adapt to external circumstances. Artificial intelligence is just the latest of these. But transformation in the South African context also, because of our historical context, has a different flavor to it. My fellow vice-chancellors in South Africa, actually Sizwe Mabizela at Rhodes University—he's a mathematician, he has a very measured way of speaking—he said, "Transformation is a word that in the South African context has been eviscerated of all meaning." Now what he mean by that is because it was so much focused on race and demographics, and those are the only two, and that's because of our very complex history. But transformation, I try to put forward a much more nuanced way of looking at this in different levels of transformation, how it is looked at in knowledge renewal, but also in what we're specifically talking about now is in global health and how global health is also transforming and how we look at it and with the challenges that are... You know, climate change is a very significant challenge for us now.

[00:05:37] Dr. Rob Murphy: You've really built a state-of-the-art research institute referred to as the BMRI. It's impressive. It's a phenomenal facility. How did you make that happen?

[00:05:49] Dr. Wim de Villiers: Yeah, so that was a very ambitious project. So it's a Biomedical Research Institute. It's a large building that can house up to a thousand scientists, and it has filled up pretty quickly. And how did we do that? And here I do want to give the government some credit as they funded part of that. It was a 1.2 billion rand infrastructure project, and the university through its endowment also contributed about a third of that, and for the rest we fundraised. And it's proven actually more successful than I had hoped for because, as you said, it's a very impressive facility. And what we have there is an excellent facility. It is cutting-edge, state-of-the-art equipment, including top-notch sequencing—genomic sequencing facilities—probably the best on the continent. We have excellent scientists, both local and international, data scientists, virologists, bioinformaticians, et cetera. And we are training for the continent. So, yes, we are located in Africa, but we are also there for Africa. So we train a very large number of scientists and researcher-scientists for the continent. In addition to that, we have a biorepository. It's called the Hamilton Bios. At that time, it was the first such biorepository in the Southern Hemisphere. There are not many of them worldwide, actually. So it can house up to 5 to 6 million samples that are color-coded and stored in liquid nitrogen. And it's relatively close to our clinical facility and our clinical training facility. So you have all these different elements in place to really lead and to contribute to a very significant endeavor through which we'll be able to contribute to knowledge not only locally, but also globally, and where we're able to apply and be successful for multiple grants.

[00:07:38] Dr. Rob Murphy: You and I have watched this partnership between our universities grow over many years. Why was it important to move this work from the original student exchange program, which was very successful, into the collaborations that have led to this Global Health Knowledge Hub?

[00:07:54] Dr. Wim de Villiers: I feel privileged that I've been able to be part of this program for 10 of its 20 years. Again, I want to compliment Northwestern for its persistence in this because, you know, we always say universities are institutions for the ages, but, you know, centers and institutes, not so much. We have many memorandums of understanding with numerous universities across the world, but Stellenbosch University in my time really focused on internationalization as having a few select strategic partners. And it was very clear early on, after I met the leadership at Northwestern and you guys, that this is such a strategic partnership that we want to really expand beyond just mere student exchanges. But student exchanges, I need to say, are extremely important because they're very formative, transformative. And if one talks about an exchange that is also not only from Northwestern to Stellenbosch, but also from Stellenbosch to Northwestern. So they're life-changing. And it's to identify and to nurture those folks and emerging scientists and academics who have the fire in the belly, who can really take on the leadership going forward.

[00:09:04] Dr. Rob Murphy: Oh, it...That program is hugely successful, very vibrant, dynamic, and growing. We couldn't go where we are if we didn't have that, because we got the students really interested, and they put themselves in the driver's seat. This is what they want, and they asked for it, and they got it.

[00:09:18] Dr. Wim de Villiers: Yeah. And it works. It's undergraduate students, it's postgraduate students, postdoctoral students. But then it's also mid-career-level academics, some of the more senior academics. And we should not forget the importance of this for support staff, because the support staff are those people who really... they oil the wheels of a large engine and of such research,

[00:09:39] Dr. Rob Murphy: Like for this meeting that we...

[00:09:40] Dr. Wim de Villiers: Exactly.

And it's... I mean, world-class. It's going very well. It's fantastic.

[00:09:44] Dr. Rob Murphy: It's hard to pull these types of meetings off. It really is, and both of our universities have done a great job with that. Where do you see the greatest opportunities for Northwestern and Stellenbosch to complement one another and accomplish something together that neither of us could do alone?

[00:10:00] Dr. Wim de Villiers: I think that this meeting has again emphasized to me... So there are 44 academic personnel from Stellenbosch visiting Northwestern in this visit. And it really emphasized to me the depth and breadth not only of our institution, but much more impressively of these institutions combined. So it's a combined strength of how we benefit from that. Of course, one could be very transactional in this regard and say, "Yes, well, it's going to enable us to apply for grant funding and we're going to be successful, and the NIH is open again for business for South Africa." And that's fantastic, but it's much deeper than that. It's again coming back to that underlying philosophy of internationalization: that we cannot solve these complex problems that we as humanity and as a planet face. We cannot solve that on our own. So if we talk about climate and climate change and disasters and the impact that has, we talk about... we will have another pandemic soon.

[00:11:03] Dr. Rob Murphy: Oh yeah, absolutely. When...

[00:11:05] Dr. Wim de Villiers: Yes. When is it, and what is it exactly going to be, and how are we going to counter that?

[00:11:09] Dr. Rob Murphy: I mean, it was your scientists at the BMRI that discovered the omicron...

[00:11:13] Dr. Wim de Villiers: That's correct. And so I worked very closely with Professor Tulio de Oliveira. And that's a very interesting example. So, yes, because of the HIV epidemic, high prevalence in South Africa, we were very well versed to pivot to COVID and to identify and characterize these new variants. Tulio and his team at the BMRI at Stellenbosch University identified both the beta and the omicron variants. So, omicron was fairly late in the epidemic, so we were the first to identify this virus; we were the last country to get the vaccine. Now that is a great example of the inequity that is what we do not want in global health. But that stems from a different conversation, really, which is that we are not producing any vaccines in Africa. So immediately we need to do that, and we are certainly busy with that and working on that in terms of innovation and entrepreneurship.

[00:12:08] Dr. Rob Murphy: What is the status of vaccine manufacturing in South Africa now?

[00:12:12] Dr. Wim de Villiers: It is nascent. There is quite a bit of government funding for that, and also international funding for that. So we now have the ability to do mRNA vaccine production. We also have the ability to produce our own enzymes to facilitate that.

[00:12:27] Dr. Rob Murphy: The hub officially launched last year at a similar event held at Stellenbosch University. I was there along with 40 of my colleagues from Northwestern. How important are gatherings like this that make the partnerships sustainable?

[00:12:41] Dr. Wim de Villiers: It's crucial. I think back to the pandemic times when university presidents were confined to homes. It was terrible. There were countless webinars every day, and university presidents said, "Oh, this is the end of the university as we know it. Everything's going to be online from now on." And look where we are again: the pendulum has swung right back. Yes, of course, there's a very important place for virtual meetings. I think that is very important. But face-to-face meetings—it's impossible to replace, because it's these interactions that allow friendships and networks to develop from the ground up, not enforced from the top down. And it's where people talk about, you know, you meet at a poster, you hear some interesting comment, you say, "Well, what do you do? Okay, I've got this." And then you suddenly realize, "Wow, this person is looking at water quality on dairy farms in South Africa." Well, that's a problem, and here as well. And we can certainly contribute to knowledge development and exploration in that regard. I think this meeting size is ideal. It should be not too large. It should allow for small, intimate, and lots of interaction and discussion.

[00:13:47] Dr. Rob Murphy: I think we hit a sweet spot here with the format of the meeting, but also the size of the meeting. It's big enough that we've got a lot of disciplines involved, and there's a lot of cross-interdisciplinary activity and relationship building. On the other hand, it's not just a small group. I think the size here has been ideal. I think this is a good model to follow at this point, because as you say, you know, we went from the Zoom world, the Zoom boom, "never going to have another international meeting again, or even a regional meeting again, everything is going to need to be on Zoom," to "we have to meet, they're making people go back to offices again." I think people are realizing that the physical interactions that we have with each other are so critically important to make this thing work. When you look at the global big health challenges facing the world today, what gives you hope that partnerships like ours can help solve them?

[00:14:42] Dr. Wim de Villiers: So I'm known as a glass-half-full person. Very much. I'm very much... I know that I'm very much an optimist. I mean, there's this wonderful tune where the author says in the end there's no benefit to being a pessimist, because the only benefit to that is that in the end, you're correct if you're a pessimist. But that doesn't contribute to anything as we're planning for the future. So, very simplistic: education and health. That's really the key to a successful future in terms of economic development and job creation. In South Africa, we have what I always call the four horsemen of the apocalypse, and that's poverty, unemployment, inequality, and corruption, unfortunately, at this time. And the fourth one is receiving a lot of attention...

[00:15:25] Dr. Rob Murphy: A lot of attention.

[00:15:26] Dr. Wim de Villiers: The complex health issues that we face today, we cannot solve on our own. And we do... but we do have the tools to do that. And I think together we can certainly do that.

[00:15:37] Dr. Rob Murphy: Well, that's a good note to land on, I think. I've been accused of being irrationally exuberant. I am very hopeful for the future, and I think relationships like ours are going to only help the cause.

[00:15:51] Dr. Wim de Villiers: Thank you very much.

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