Ushma Mehta

Ushma Mehta is a pharmacoepidemiologist involved in regulatory, clinical and programmatic pharmacovigilance for over 30 years. Based at the University of Cape Town’s School of Public Health. She has managed the South African National Adverse Event Monitoring Centre, was the technical manager of the WHO Global Training Centre for Vaccine Safety and has provided training and technical support to several countries across the globe in the development of their national pharmacovigilance systems. Her work has included the development of pharmacovigilance systems for monitoring the safety of antimalarials, antiretroviral medicines, vaccines and most recently medicines used in pregnant women. She has developed technical documents and guidelines for safety surveillance of medicines and vaccines in pregnant and breastfeeding mothers, vaccine safety surveillance and antiretroviral toxicity surveillance.

She was a member of the South African Medicines Control Council, serving as the chair of the Pharmacovigilance Committee and then served as an inaugural Board Member of the new South African Health Products Regulatory Agency from 2018-2021. She is the co-PI of the UBOMI BUHLE Pregnancy exposure registry in South Africa and serves on the WHO Expert Steering Committee for monitoring safety in pregnancy. She is currently serving as a member of the Advisory Committee of the Safety of Medicinal Products (ACSoMP).