Our Team
Organising team
Peter van Heusden
Senior Bioinformatician, SANBI | Co-lead, RSSE Africa
Peter is a bioinformatician at SANBI where he has worked for many years. His research focuses include research systems engineering, scientific workflow systems, and pathogen genomics and genomic epidemiology. He is also involved in the Galaxy community and PHA4GE.
Anelda van der Walt
Founder, Talarify | Senior eResearch Analyst, University of Cape Town | Co-lead, RSSE Africa
Anelda van der Walt is a South African research infrastructure and open science practitioner with over 15 years of experience supporting digitally enabled research. She is a Senior eResearch Analyst at the University of Cape Town, founder of Talarify, and a PhD candidate in Information Science at the University of Pretoria. Her work focuses on research software, open science, capacity development, and community building across Africa.
Founders
RSSE Africa was founded in 2019 by Peter van Heusden and Eugene de Beste from the South African National Bioinformatics Institute (SANBI) at the University of the Western Cape.
Peter van Heusden
Senior Bioinformatician, SANBI | Co-lead, RSSE Africa
Peter is a bioinformatician at SANBI where he has worked for many years. His research focuses include research systems engineering, scientific workflow systems, and pathogen genomics and genomic epidemiology. He is also involved in the Galaxy community and PHA4GE.
Eugene de Beste
Senior Infrastructure Engineer, NexGen Cloud | Co-founder, RSSE Africa
Eugene is a DevOps/Systems engineer with a keen interest in high performance computing (HPC) and security. His M.Sc. from SANBI focussed on secure computing on biological data using cloud, workflows and containers.
Alumni team members
Mireille Grobbelaar
Researcher, Independent
Richard Dushime
Community Focused & Open Source Developer, Independent
Nomalungelo Maphanga
Postgraduate Student, Independent
Our sponsors
Talarify has been supporting the African research software community since 2016, providing dedicated staff for communication, projects, events, connecting with the global RSE network, mentorship, and more.
South African National Bioinformatics Institute (SANBI)
SANBI employees Peter van Heusden and Eugene de Beste founded RSSE Africa in 2019 and led the project that created the first website. Peter continues to play an important role in the community as mentor, adviser, and advocate for African RSSEs.
The University of Cape Town's eResearch Centre has been working with RSSE Africa since 2024.