Professor Stephen Tong is an obstetrician researcher and Co-Director of Mercy Perinatal.

He has a strong interest in translational research - developing diagnostics and therapeutics to tackle major pregnancy complications.

He co-leads a preeclampsia drug screening pipeline that identifies candidate therapies in the laboratory and tests them in successive randomised trials in Cape Town, and elsewhere. One such drug is metformin, identified by his team as possibly the first disease modifying drug for preeclampsia (Cluver et al BMJ 2021).

He holds an NHMRC Fellowship and has published 250 papers, including recent reports in The Lancet, BMJ, Nature Communications, JAMA Paediatrics, and JAMA Psychiatry.