Sylverken has a masters in clinical microbiology from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology. Her masters research was on the transmission of Wuchereria bancrofti in southwestern Ghana. After her masters, Dr Sylverken was enrolled as a PhD candidate on a project funded by the UBS Optimus Foundation. Part of the initial training was conducted at the prestigious Bernhard Nocht Institute of Tropical Medicine in Germany where she gained knowledge and insight into the use of state of the art technologies in discovering viruses. She is currently involved in a German Research Foundation (DFG) BAT project team that is using wildlife, human interaction and livestock to study the transmission interface of several viruses with focus on Coronaviruses. She is responsible for ensuring that the project runs smoothly, supervising the laboratory works of PhD students, informal teaching, preparing manuscripts and writing proposals and spearheading all academic related activities at the Kumasi Centre for Collaborative Research in Tropical Medicine

Thobakgale-Tshabalala is a Senior Lecturer and Researcher at the HIV Pathogenesis Programme at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) in South Africa. She received her PHD in immunology from the University of KwaZulu-Natal and also trained as a postdoctoral fellow with the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard (USA). For the past few years, her research focused on understanding cellular and viral factors that influenced disease progression in HIV-infected infants and findings from this work yielded numerous important findings which had an impact in changing treatment guidelines for children worldwide. She has authored and co-authored 21 publications and presented her research at various local and international conferences.

She currently supervises seven postgraduate students and her research group contributes to science by understanding the innate immune responses and their impact to control HIV & TB infections.
Dr Thobakgale-Tshabalala is a Wellcome Trust Fellow in Public Health and Tropical Medicine; a member of the South African Academy of Science; a South African ambassador for a global project aimed at young girls to encourage uptake of Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics (STEM) subjects and has been recognised by the Ministry of Science and Technology for the Distinguished Young Women in Science award.