Liesl Zühlke

Liesl Zühlke (born 10 April 1968) is a South African cardiologist who specialises in paediatric and rheumatic heart disease. She works at Red Cross War Memorial Children's Hospital as a paediatric cardiologist, and is the only one in her country to serve as a full professor in paediatric cardiology.

Biography
She was born on 10 April 1968 in Cape Town. She was educated at the University of Cape Town (UCT) Medical School, where she received her Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery in 1991, her Master of Public Health in 2011, and her PhD in 2015; her PhD dissertation, supervised by Bongani Mayosi and Mark Engel, was titled The outcomes of asymptomatic and symptomatic rheumatic heart disease. She received her Master of Science in Health Economics, Outcomes and Management in Cardiovascular Sciences at the London School of Economics in 2018, having received a grant from the European Society of Cardiology to do so.

After working as a senior registrar at Red Cross War Memorial Children's Hospital Department of Paediatrics and Child Health (2000–2002; 2006–2007) and abroad at University Hospital of Düsseldorf (2004–2006), she was promoted to senior specialist in paediatric cardiology (2007–2008), before serving as Clinical Coordinator and Researcher of the Stop Rheumatic Heart Disease A.S.A.P. Programme (2008–2016). After working as a senior research officer and postdoctoral fellow at UCT (2015–2016), she returned to Red Cross War Memorial as a paediatric cardiologist and, from 2021 to 2022, was Acting Deputy-Dean for Research at UCT's Faculty of Health Sciences.

As an academic, she specialises in paediatric and rheumatic heart disease. She is South Africa's only woman to serve as a full professor in paediatric cardiology. In 2015, she started the Children's Heart Disease Research Unit. Additionally, her research topics include the epidemiology and medical genetics of heart disease, heart disease in youth and young women, and heart disease associated with HIV and COVID-19. She was the winner of the South African Medical Research Council and Department for International Development's 2018 African Research Leader Award.

In 2012, she became president of the Paediatric Cardiac Society of South Africa, serving until 2016; from that year until 2018, she served as president of the South African Heart Association. She was the first woman of colour elected to either position. She became president of Rheumatic Heart Disease, Evidence, Advocacy, Communication and Hope in 2018. She has also served as the South African Medical Research Council's vice-president of extramural research and the internal portfolio, as chair of the Pan-African Society of Cardiology's task forces for paediatric and rheumatic heart disease as a member of the World Heart Federation's board.

She is a member of the Academy of Science of South Africa. She is also Fellow of the College of Paediatricians of South Africa (1999), Fellow of the European Society of Cardiology (2015), and Fellow of the American College of Cardiology (2016).

Her husband, Alexander Zühlke, is a plastic surgeon, and they have two sons.