Professor Alta Schutte

Alta (Aletta E.) Schutte PhD FESC FRRSAf ISHF is SHARP Professor and Principal Theme Lead of Cardiac, Vascular and Metabolic Medicine in the Faculty of Medicine and Health at UNSW Sydney, Australia; with a joint appointment as Professorial Fellow at the George Institute for Global Health. She is a NHMRC Investigator Grant Leadership Fellow.

She has extensive experience in working in clinical and population-based studies with a focus on raised blood pressure, hypertension and cardiovascular disease. She has been the Chief Investigator of several multidisciplinary studies, published >500 papers in the field of blood pressure and cardiovascular disease, and supervised over 85 postgraduate students. She is involved in numerous international consortia, such as the Global Burden of Disease study (Washington DC), the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (London), May Measurement Month initiative of the International Society of Hypertension, and was one of 20 invited authors to join the Lancet Commission of Hypertension. She is the senior author of the 2020 International Society of Hypertension Global Hypertension Guidelines.

She has been acknowledged for her work as winner of the Distinguished Woman Scientist in the Natural, Engineering and Life Sciences award, presented by the South African Department of Science and Technology; the NSTF South 32 TW Kambule Award; the British Association Medal from the Southern Africa Association for the Advancement of Science, the Meiring Naude Medal from the Royal Society of South Africa, the AU-TWAS (African Union & The World Academy of Sciences) Award, the 2019 African Union Kwame Nkrumah Regional Award for Scientific Excellence, 2020 KIFRA Prize in Science, 2022 Harriet Dustan Award of the American Heart Association's Hypertension Council and 2023 Peter Sleight Excellence Award in Hypertension Clinical Research from the World Hypertension League. In 2023 and again in 2024, she was recognised as the Leading Researcher in Vascular Medicine by The Australian, and in 2024 received the Fiona Stanley Award from the NHMRC as the highest ranked applicant awarded with a $5 million SYNERGY grant.

She serves as Associate Editor of Hypertension and is on the Editorial Board of several major hypertension and cardiovascular journals. She is Company Secretary of the Australian Cardiovascular Alliance, Board Member of Hypertension Australia, Fellow of the European Society of Cardiology, the International Society of Hypertension and the Royal Society of South Africa, the Past President of the Southern African Hypertension Society (SAHS), and Past President of the International Society of Hypertension (ISH). She is Co-Chair of the National Hypertension Taskforce of Australia.