With a career spanning nearly 3 decades, and combining clinical medicine with computational approaches, Dr Deffur has developed a unique view of human health.
Training in medicine and internal medicine, he witnessed the dual HIV and TB epidemic in South African public hospitals. This motivated him to qualify in infectious diseases, a medical field that recently was much publicised during the COVID-19 pandemic. Grappling with complex biomedical problems, he ventured into fields like system dynamics and complex systems before obtaining expertise, and eventually a PhD in bioinformatics and computational biology, the first clinician in South Africa to do so.
Medicine
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Dr Deffur studied medicine in Pretoria, qualifying in 1995. After internship, obtaining a Diploma in Tropical Health and a year as medical officer, he spent two years working in different healthcare settings in the UK (England and Wales).
He specialised in Internal Medicine at Pretoria Academic Hospital, earning his MMed in 2006. This training included working in Belgium in the discipline of infectious diseases.
Later, in 2008-2010, he obtained the subspecialty in Infectious Diseases, having trained at Groote Schuur Hospital.
Digital Health
Dr Deffur has a long-standing interest in digital health, as embodied by wearable devices capable of measuring multiple health-related metrics and generating health-related insights even at times when patients are not in a hospital or the consulting rooms.
Genomics
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Through his training in medicine and bioinformatics Dr Deffur is uniquely positioned to understand and help interpret complex genomic datasets (e.g. human DNA sequencing). He has a significant interest in utilising genomic information to improve medical decision making for individual patients. “Genomic medicine” is an underserved area in clinical medicine, and expands on the traditional scope of clinical genetics (with its focus on monogenic disorders and familial diseases).
Science
Dr Deffur has published multiple scientific, peer-reviewed papers. His work ranges from cardiovascular disease through infectious diseases, immunology and methods in scientific computing. Most of the work is highly interdisciplinary.
Expedition medicine
The year 2000 was a special year for Dr Deffur. He spent 14 months as the Station Manager and Medical Officer on the scientific research base SANAE IV in Queen Maud Land, Antarctica. There he had to deal with medical (and dental!) issues in complete isolation.
Computing
After his first exposure to computing in the form of a Commodore 64, through various MS-DOS and Windows based machines and finally delving deeply into the world of UNIX, Dr Deffur has obtained practical experience in several programming languages and scientific/ technical computing paradigms (e.g. Mathematica, R, Python, Cypher, Docker), and is actively developing solutions in this space.
He was the first clinician in South Africa to complete a very intensive 18 week training programme in bioinformatics in Cape Town, and his interdisciplinary PhD (2013) was at the intersection of clinical medicine, immunology and computational biology.