Professor Sunette Pienaar holds a BA (Cum Laude) from the University of Johannesburg, a BD (Cum Laude) from the University of Pretoria and a PhD also from the University of Pretoria. She has published articles and presented papers at national and international conferences on HIV/AIDS, gender, the politics of care, public-private partnerships (PPPs), multi-stakeholder collaborations, global health partnerships, the millennium development goals and community engagement.

She has also developed training material on PPPs and corporate social responsibility and lectured in these areas. From 2007 – 2010, the construction company Murray & Roberts supported Prof Pienaar to establish a subject field in partnerships at the Unisa Institute for Corporate Citizenship (ICC). Since 2010 she was responsible for the Collaborative Governance and Partnership Research Programme at the ICC. Prof Pienaar was appointed as the Deputy Director for Community Engagement at Unisa on the 1st of November 2012.

She served as Chairperson of the Research Ethics Committee and the Community Engagement Committee in the College of Economic and Management Sciences at Unisa between 2010 and 2012. Prof Pienaar is a board member of the South African Higher Education Community Engagement Forum, the Institute for Social and Health Sciences at Unisa and a member of the Prince of Wales’s programme on Business and the Environment. She has received international recognition for her social innovations. She is a Paul Harris Fellow, a World Economic Forum Schwab Social Entrepreneur, a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, a member of the African Leadership Network and the Founding Curator for the Tshwane World Economic Forum Global Shapers Community. She is also the founder and chairman of Heartbeat, a NGO that has supported 50 000 orphaned and vulnerable children in South Africa over the last 12 years.