On March 30th, 2023, Prof. Dr. Namrita Lall from University of Pretoria, South Africa, was invited by Prof. Dr. Guangmin Yao to give a nice lecture at the Zoom (ID 2945772798,https://us06web.zoom.us/j/2945772798?pwd=ZEw5TGorUmVLcU5TeVJGQWZ5d3Q1QT09) entitled"Natural solutions for health and beauty products". This lecture was hosted by Professor Guangmin Yao, and 32 teachers and students from the School of Pharmacy participated online.
In the lecture, Prof. Dr.Lall introduced the rich resources of the medicinal plants in South Africa, the University of Pretoria, and their research platform, as well asherresearch field and the latest research progress and results. In particular, her lecture gave us a lot of inspiration and opened up our research ideas on developing health and beauty products based on the unique natural medicinal plant resources in South Africa.
After the lecture, the teachers and students at the meeting talked enthusiastically and asked questions actively. Prof. Lall answered all the questions such as the resources, distribution and collection of medicinal plants in South Africa. Prof. Lall agreed to cooperate with Prof. Yao based on South African rich medicinal plants resources and taking advantage ofbothprofessional platforms, and both of them would jointly apply for the international cooperation projects of Hubei Province or the Ministry of Science and Technology of China, to search new drug lead compounds with novel structures from South African medicinal plants and exploit the medicinal plants resources in South Africa.
Professor Lall’s wonderful lecture attracted great attention from teachers and students attending the meeting. The online seminar has broadened the research ideas and international horizons of graduate students.
Professor Namrita Lall obtained her Ph. D. in medicinal plant science from the University of Pretoria in 2001 and was hired as a professor at the University of Pretoria in 2016.Prof Lall is a Research Chair at the University of Pretoria and has been placed in the Essential Science Indicators list of the top 1% of publication outputs (citations) in the discipline Pharmacology and Toxicology. She has recently been listed as part of Stanford’s University List of the Top 2% Scientist of the World. Six start-up companies resulted from Prof Lall’s research programme.Two pharmaceutical products for skin-hyperpigmentation and liver protection have been commercialized internationally and another twelve are close to commercialization. She has published more than 177 research articles, 13 patents, more than 70 book chapters.Four books on medicinal plants edited by Prof Lall, have been published by the publishers; ‘Elsevier’ and ‘Taylor and Francis’. Among several awards received in recognition for her work, a few are “The Order of Mapungubwe”, South Africa’s highest honour from the Honorable South African President Jacob Zuma (April 2014), and UNESCO-L’Oreal Award for Women in Science (one of the 10 selected candidates internationally, March 2002, in Paris).
