South Africa
Cape Town
- Tygerberg Hospital, Cape Town
Professor Cathy Cluver
Principal Investigator
Professor Cathy Cluver is a Maternal-Fetal Medicine subspecialist and clinician researcher. She founded and continues to lead the Preeclampsia Research Unit at Stellenbosch University (www.preeclampsiaresearch.org). This Research Unit is a multidisciplinary multinational research collaboration focussing on understanding and treating preeclampsia. Cathy is currently running her third double blind interventional treatment trial for preterm preeclampsia (PI3 trial), a multicentre preeclampsia prevention trial (APPLE PIE) and studies investigating novel therapeutics to treat preeclampsia (DM199). She is also supervising PhD projects in fetal growth restriction and preterm birth.
Cathy obtained her MMed in 2011 cum laude and was awarded both the Daubenton Medal for outstanding results in the Fellowship examination of the College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists and the medal for the Best Postgraduate Student for a Structures Masters Qualification at Stellenbosch University. In 2013 she undertook a Maternal Fetal Medicine Fellowship at Mercy Hospital for Women, in Melbourne Australia. She then completed her subspecialist training in South Africa in 2016. After completing her PhD in 2019, she was appointed as an associate professor. In 2023 she was appointed as a full professor at Stellenbosch University. She is the youngest appointed professor in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology. In 2023 she was awarded the Women in Research Award by Stellenbosch University.
She has over 100 publications including publications in the Lancet, BMJ, Lancet Global and Cochrane Library. She has published extensively in leading Obstetrics and Gynaecological journals including the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Obstetrics and Gynecology, British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology and Ultrasound in Obstetrics and Gyneacology. She has also presented invited plenary sessions at many international and national conferences.
Professor Lina Bergman
Lina is a senior obstetrician, professor at Stellenbosch University in South Africa and associate professor at University of Gothenburg in Sweden. She completed her specialist training from 2011 to 2017 and earned her PhD in 2017 at Uppsala University, focusing on preeclampsia and cerebral biomarkers. Lina divides her time between her two research sites at Stellenbosch University in South Africa and University of Gothenburg in Sweden. She focuses on a translational approach to understand underlying causes to complications in preeclampsia. Her research also focuses on prediction of preeclampsia and its complications and discovery of novel treatment to prevent and/or treat preeclampsia.
Lina is the principal investigator for the Nordic multicenter clinical trial PI 4 (using metformin to slower disease progression in preterm preeclampsia). She is also an investigator for the biobanks PROVE (South Africa) and GO PROVE (Sweden) together with Professor Cathy Cluver, and the clinical cohort for first trimester prediction of pregnancy complications, the IMPACT study. She also collaborates on register-based research in the Swedish Pregnancy Register. In addition, she runs a pre-clinical preeclampsia research group in Sweden, establishing animal models for preeclampsia and eclampsia to evaluate new disease-modifying drugs. Her research is funded largely by the Wallenberg Foundation, the European Research Council and the Swedish Research council.
She supervises seven PhD students and co-supervises five others. Active in the national Swedish Preeclampsia working group, she has served on several scientific committees and is an active member of CoLab for international collaboration in preeclampsia research. Lina is a group member of the FIGO Committee on the impact of Pregnancy on longterm health. She is a part of the Steering group for WHO Preeclampsia Summit 2030 and a member of the ISSHP guideline group for preeclampsia 2026. Lina also reviews for several journals and is a frequent speaker at national and international conferences.