Dr Nigel Gericke

Nigel Gericke is a senior advisor to and founding CSO of Kanna Health.

He is a medical doctor, ethnobotanist and ethnopharmacologist, and is passionate about the health and wellness potential of natural products developed from medicinal plants. Nigel pioneered the foundational ethnobotanical, pharmacological and clinical research into Sceletium tortuosum, kanna, over the past thirty years.

He has worked globally as a consultant in natural products R&D and innovation for leading nutraceutical and food and beverage companies, including PepsiCo. As an entrepreneur he founded and co-founded a number of successful natural product companies in South Africa including HG&H Pharmaceuticals and Phyto Nova, and founded the start-ups Phytodigital Discoveries and Integral Bioceuticals.

Non-commercial work includes documenting indigenous knowledge or posterity, and making this work accessible to the public and academia via books and papers. He has authored and co-authored 32 research papers, 2 books, 5 chapters; his h-index is 20, with 4,372 citations.  He has served as an advisory panelist to the United States Pharmacopoeia, a peer-reviewer for the Journal of Ethnopharmacology, a founding member of the Association for African Medicinal Plants Standards (AAMPS), and member of the Medicinal Plants Specialist Group of the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF).

He has degrees in medicine (MBBCh), botany & zoology (BSc) and plant ecology (BSc Honours) from the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. He currently lives in Switzerland.