Professor Tanya Doherty is a chief specialist scientist in the Health Systems Research Unit, SAMRC. Her research focus is health system requirements for the optimal delivery of priority child health programmes at community and primary care. She has conducted several cluster-randomised trials and programme evaluations of community and primary services in South Africa and across the continent and has published over 100 peer reviewed articles. Tanya has had an interest in the ethics of global health research for many years. She began her career as a project assistant for the Program on Ethical Issues in International Health Research at Harvard School of Public Health. This position involved conducting background research and writing case studies for use in ethics training courses. Over the two decades of her career she has had considerable experience leading multi-country research on the continent that has been funded by high income country and multi-lateral partners. Based on these experiences she has written about power imbalances and unethical research practices. Tanya has also been an expert advisor to WHO and served as a working group lead for the WHO/UNICEF/Lancet Commission ‘A Future for the World’s Children’. These experiences led her to be an advocate for greater voice from researchers in the global south with regard to priority setting in research.