Dr Annemarie Wentzel is a senior lecturer and researcher at the Hypertension in Africa Research Team (HART), NWU. Her research focus is Stress Physiology with specializations in neuro-cardiology, neuro-endocrinology, and cardiometabolic stress-reactivity. She aims to address the molecular, physiological and clinical implications of acute stress responses and sustained stress, to identify early pathways of intervention, in cardiometabolic diseases. Dr Wentzel has authored 28 research papers, 39 national-and international conference proceedings in leading physiology-and clinical journals, and she has received awards on her stress-focussed work from the American Heart Association 2023. She is the first author of defining papers identifying alternative etiologies of T2DM and was awarded the USA’s NIH Coleman-Innovation Award for her clinical-epidemiological research introducing a stress-based focus in T2DM. Annemarie and her team also identified cumulative stress as an independent cardiometabolic risk factor in young adults and continue to explore the psychophysiological and neuro-endocrinological-based mechanisms in stress, and stress control. She has been funded by the SA-NRF, SA-MRC, NIH, NIDDK, NIMHD (USA), and HSFSA. She is training 4-PhD, 10 MHSc-students, and have trained 5 NIH Post-Bac Fellows, and 3 visiting clinicians. She is the PI of the SweetHeart study, a clinical-epidemiological study assessing the genetic, molecular and physiological mechanisms of stress in T2DM, employing traditional and advanced analytics, including neural networks. Annemarie firmly believes that science is a team sport, and aims to translate these fundamental physiological insights into improved clinical interventions.