Professor Ismail Kalla is a physician-scientist at the forefront of integrating artificial intelligence into medical research and education. He serves as a lead investigator on multiple Gates Foundation-funded AI projects, including Student AI, VALID-1, and VALID-2. He is a Fellow of the Wits Machine Intelligence and Neural Discovery (MIND) Institute and applies AI tools across both undergraduate and postgraduate medical training platforms at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits). Professor Kalla holds dual specialist certification in Pulmonology and Critical Care Medicine. He is an Associate Professor in the Department of Internal Medicine at the School of Clinical Medicine at Wits and serves as Academic Head of Department. He chairs the GEMP 1–2 Curriculum Committee and leads the Internal Medicine Supernumerary Portfolio, with a primary focus on redeveloping the undergraduate medical platform. His clinical research spans pulmonary hypertension, asthma, COPD, bronchiectasis, diffuse parenchymal lung disease, post-TB lung disease, and multidrug-resistant organisms. He directs the Pulmonary-Infectious Disease Research Unit at Wits. He is the sole Southern African representative on the Middle East and Africa Asthma Steering Committee, working to improve patient outcomes in low- and middle-income countries. Professor Kalla is Principal Investigator for several multinational COVID-19 trials, including WHO Solidarity, REMAP-CAP, ACCCOS, and RECOVERY. He also contributes to national collaborations in pulmonary hypertension diagnostics and extrapulmonary tuberculosis detection. He is also a Fellow of the Infectious Disease and Oncology Research Institute (IDORI).