Dr Mary Kawonga graduated with an MBChB (1991) from the University of Zambia and a Diploma in Health Services Management (1997) with Distinction at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. She holds a PhD in Public Health (2015) from WITS, and is a fellow of the College of Public Health Medicine in South Africa.

Dr Kawonga has contributed to teaching at Postgraduate and Undergraduate level, and clinical training of public health medicine registrars. Her teaching roles also extend to classroom lecture sessions, research supervision, and mentoring of students enrolled for the Master of Public Health, Master of Science in Epidemiology, and PhD within the school. At postgraduate level within the School of Public Health, she has been involved in teaching Health Measurement I & II, Health and Society, and Research Protocol Development within the MPH programme and she took convening roles in courses such as Surveillance and Implementation Science I, within the MSc Epidemiology programme. She has led the MPH curriculum review, which culminated into core competencies for the first year of all MPH fields of study. Dr Kawonga has supervised 27 masters and three PhD students to completion, and is currently supervising two masters and four PhD students.

Her research interests lie in health services research and evaluation and health policy and systems research, including implementation research. She has 35 peer-reviewed publications. Her research output has increased significantly over the last five years with 23 peer-reviewed publications.

She has been an external examiner to four academic institutions in South Africa for either their postgraduate programmes or postgraduate student’s research reports. She is currently a member of research committee, executive, teaching & learning, and plagiarism committees with the school of public health, and the undergraduate committee within the faculty.

Previously, she was a member of several committees in the School of Public Health, School of Clinical Medicine and Faculty. External to Wits, she has been a peer reviewer for more than 10 journals, reviewer for conference abstracts, external reviewer for research funding applications to funding bodies.