BIOSKETCH
Thumbi Ndung’u is the Scientific Director of the HIV Pathogenesis Programme and a Professor in HIV/TB Research at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. He is the Director for Basic and Translational Science at the Africa Health Research Institute (AHRI), a Professor of Infectious Diseases at University College London, and he holds the Victor Daitz Chair in HIV/TB Research at the HIV Pathogenesis Programme, Nelson R Mandela School of Medicine, University of KwaZulu-Natal. He is the Programme Director of the Sub-Saharan African Network for TB/HIV Research Excellence (SANTHE), a research and capacity building initiative. He is also an Associate Member of the Ragon Institute of Massachusetts General Hospital, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University.He graduated with a Bachelor of Veterinary Medicine degree from the University of Nairobi, Kenya and a PhD in Biological Sciences in Public Health from Harvard University, United States. He did postdoctoral research in Virology at Harvard Medical School.He is a recipient of the South African Medical Research Council Gold award for seminal scientific contributions that have impacted on the health of people. He is a member of the Academy of Science of South Africa and a fellow of the African Academy of Sciences.He is interested in host-pathogen interactions, particularly antiviral immune responses associated with protection against or control of HIV infection. His research focuses on harnessing antiviral immune responses for HIV vaccine development or cure, the implications of HIV diversity for epidemic spread, pathogenesis and immune control and the impact of HIV infection on antituberculosis immune control mechanisms. He has been involved in characterizing adaptive immune responses, intrinsic and host restriction factors involved in innate immune resistance to HIV, host genetic factors in HIV pathogenesis and viral adaptation to host immune responses. His work has exclusively focused on understudied populations and viral strains in resource-limited, high burden settings where knowledge of the role of antiviral immune responses, viral strains and associated genetic factors is likely to yield the greatest impact for biomedical interventions such as vaccines. He has expertise in virology, immunology and virus/host interactions. He has co-authored more than 250 peer-reviewed publications.Prof Ndung’u has been the principal investigator of a number of well-characterized clinical cohort-based studies of HIV-1 infected study subjects in the highly burdened country of South Africa.  These cohorts are invaluable in studies of HIV-1 pathogenesis in countries most affected by the HIV/AIDS epidemic.He actively participates in the training of graduate and postdoctoral researchers and has supervised or is currently supervising more than 20 postgraduate students. He has special interest in capacity building for biomedical research in Africa.His achievements include generation of the first infectious molecular of HIV-1 subtype C from primary cells and generation of first infectious subtype C envelope-derived simian-human immunodeficiency.