Charmy Twala is a PhD student at the University of Johannesburg, Department of Chemical Sciences. He completed his MSc in Biochemistry & Bioinformatics in 2018 and holds a Postgraduate Diploma from the Department of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, both obtained from the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits). He is currently working as a Lecturer at the University of South Africa (UNISA), where he conducts research in computational drug design, amongst other duties. Charmy completed a hybrid course certificate in Coding facilitated by the Centre for High-Performance Computing and the National Institute for Theoretical and Computational Sciences (CHPC - NITheCS) in 2023. He is a Principal Investigator in the Computational Modelling Group, on which he has supervised over 30 Honours students to completion, and is currently involved in the supervision and co-supervision of various Masters projects within the area of computational drug design.

Penny Govender is the Director of Research Capacity Development and Acting Senior Director of the Postgraduate School at the University of Johannesburg (UJ). She joined UJ in 2002 as an academic in the Faculty of Science and served as Head of Department (2016–2019). As a Professor of Computational Chemistry, her research spans energy, water, materials science and diseases. She holds a PhD in Chemistry and has published over 100 peer-reviewed articles in high-impact journals, authored a book, and contributed to 11 book chapters. Professor Govender has supervised more than 20 Master’s and PhD students and eight postdoctoral fellows. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and has received several awards, including UJ’s Vice-Chancellor’s Distinguished Award for Most Promising Young Researcher. She actively contributes to the scientific community through peer review, editorial roles, and grant evaluations for institutions such as the NRF, ESF and Oréal-UNESCO.

Krishna Govender is an Associate Professor and head of the E = C2M2 research group within the Department of Chemical Sciences at the University of Johannesburg. He is a computational chemist and material scientist whose research focuses on computer-aided drug design and material development in pursuit of more effective drugs for the treatment of cancer, nano-delivery drug transportation, steel corrosion treatment and better battery technologies. The computational methodologies and tools utilized in his research group include molecular mechanics, molecular docking, quantum mechanics, molecular dynamics, hybrid QM/MM and python. He is the chair of the South African Chemical Institute (SACI) Molecular Modelling Division, chair of the Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) Computational Chemistry and Materials Modelling Special Interest Group (SIG), and a member of the National Institute of Theoretical and Computational Sciences (NITheCS). He has a C2 rating from the National Research Foundation (NRF) and is an editor of Physical Chemistry for the South African Journal of Chemistry (SAJChem). Currently, he supervises and co-supervises over 20 MSc and PhD students and has numerous collaborations in South Africa and internationally. He has over 60 publications in peer-reviewed journals.