Our Team
Leadership team
Established in July 2026, the Leadership Team strengthens coordination across RSSE Africa, shares responsibility for the community's development, and helps sustain its work over the longer term. Read the full announcement.
Peter van Heusden
Strategic Lead — Senior Bioinformatician, South African National Bioinformatics Institute, University of the Western Cape
Anelda van der Walt
Strategic Lead — Senior eResearch Analyst, University of Cape Town; Director, Talarify
Barbara Ojur
Software Engineer, South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRF-SARAO)
Juan Steyn
Director of Operations, South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR)
Mthetho Sovara
Senior Research Engineer, Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC/CSIR)
Sumir Panji
Programme Manager, eLwazi Open Data Science Platform
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
Strategic Lead — Senior Bioinformatician, South African National Bioinformatics Institute, University of the Western Cape
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.