Alta Schutte

Alta Schutte is a SHARP Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine and Principal Theme Lead of Cardiac, Vascular and Metabolic Medicine at the University of New South Wales, and The George Institute for Global Health in Sydney, Australia. She is also Honorary Professor at the University of the Witwatersrand and the North-West University, South Africa.

Alta’s research interest is the early detection, prevention and effective management of high blood pressure, where she has led many population and clinical studies. In 2008 she was the Founding Director of the Hypertension in Africa Research Team (HART) and established the Medical Research Council Unit for Hypertension and Cardiovascular Disease in South Africa in 2015. She served as President of the Southern African Hypertension Society from 2014 to 2016. Since relocating to Australia in 2020 she leads clinical trials and major projects focused on improved blood pressure monitoring and blood pressure control.

Alta is an invited author of the Lancet Commission on Hypertension, and of the World Health Organization’s Technical Specifications Report for Automated Non-Invasive Blood Pressure Measuring Devices. She is an Executive Board member of STRIDE BP, an international scientific non-profit organization with the mission of improving the accuracy of blood pressure measurement and diagnosis of hypertension. Since 2017 she contributed to the establishment of May Measurement Month and continues to contribute to the global awareness campaign as a Trustee.

She was President of the International Society of Hypertension (2018-2020) during which time she initiated the development of the 2020 ISH Global Hypertension Practice Guidelines for low and high resource settings. She is co-Chair of the National Hypertension Taskforce of Australia (2022 -).

Alta has contributed to over >450 publications in the field of hypertension and ranks in the top 0.019% of 250,197 authors in the field ‘blood pressure (BP)’ (Expertscape). Alta is associated Editor of Hypertension, and editorial board member of all major hypertension journals.