Dr Stephanie van Wyk, a molecular biologist and bioinformatician, has made substantial contributions to public health initiatives through her work on Plasmodium, bacteria, viruses, and fungi, working on disease outbreaks such as malaria, COVID-19, and cholera. Her active involvement in pathogen surveillance has influenced disease mitigation in South Africa and across Africa. Currently a research fellow at the University of Cape Town, she contributes her expertise to the Collaborating Centre for Optimising Antimalarial Therapy (CCOAT) and the Mitigating Antimalarial Resistance Consortium for South and East Africa (MARC SEA) within the Department of Medicine, Division of Clinical Pharmacology. Her focus on malaria epidemiology and genetics is in unravelling the disease's complexities and its treatment.

At CCOAT and MARC SE Africa, Dr. van Wyk's work focuses on malaria epidemiology, mitigation, and genetics. She is deeply involved in science communication, advocating for a broader understanding of pathogen research and its implications for malaria mitigation. She is passionate about her work in data science, particularly in optimising and developing web-based technologies to enhance research and public health responses.