FACULTY OF HEALTH SCIENCES
Prof Sehaam Khan – building a strong workforce to serve the nation
Professor Sehaam Khan believes that
to study at university. Today, my sister is an Associate Professor at Stellenbosch University and I am at the University of Johannesburg.” Having a twin sister taught Khan about fierce loyalty, friendly competitiveness, and steadfast love. “We are brutally honest with each other though, and criticism is easily accepted. This relationship has positively influenced my relationship with others,” she notes. Khan was fascinated by biochemistry and microbiology as an undergraduate, but it was during her postgraduate studies that her passion for virology bloomed. When she received her PhD she applied for a position in academia at the then-Cape Technikon, now the Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT), which set her on the teaching path that she revels in. She moved quickly through the ranks at CPUT and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2008. “I had no idea I loved teaching until I stepped into a classroom,” she confesses. “I love engaging with students, taking a complex process and simplifying it to such an extent that students can grasp the concept.” Her mantra is that if you can’t explain a process clearly, you probably don’t understand it well yourself.
Khan has not only studied in South Africa – during her tenure at the University of the Western Cape she undertook a year of research at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, and she was a post- doctoral fellow at the Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology in Singapore from February 2005 to February 2006. From June 2014 to June 2015 she served as Acting Head of the Department for Biomedical Technology at CPUT before accepting the position as Dean of the Faculty of Health and Applied Sciences at Namibia University of Science and Technology (NUST) in 2016. Her journey has been one of steady success but to her, “success” is always relative. She defines a successful person as someone of good character. “I may admire your qualifications, respect your title, and be proud of your degrees, but I measure success by how you treat others,” she explains. As a Christian, Khan aspires to live “a life that shows the fruit of the spirit and glorifies God”. Although she says she fails and repents daily – and apologises frequently – she learns from her fallibility. “I’m aware of my actions and I scrutinise my interactions. I try my best to do better,” she points out. As an educator, Khan is proud that her faculty qualifies ten health professions, each of which contributes significantly to the
good citizenship is just as important as good science. Her love for molecular virology is helping to shape the next generation of health professionals in South Africa. Professor Sehaam Khan, the Executive Dean of Health Sciences at the University of Johannesburg, has come a long way from the Cape Flats in Cape Town, where she was raised by a single mother and grandmother. She was the first university graduate of her generation in the family, but of greater importance to her is the fact that she had these female role models who instilled in her the need for a strong moral compass. “The principles of a good work ethic were ingrained in us from secondary school all the way to university,” says Khan, who received her PhD in Microbiology from the University of the Western Cape in 2002. “My twin sister and I studied during the day and worked at KFC at night to pay for essentials, and we didn’t squander the opportunity
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