Penelope Moore | |
---|---|
Born | 29 April 1975 |
Alma mater | University of Witwatersrand University of London |
Known for | HIV research, Covid 19 research, Omicron variant |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Virology |
Institutions | University of the Witwatersrand NICD |
Website | Prof Moore at WITS |
Penelope Moore is a virologist and DST/NRF South African Research Chair of Virus-Host Dynamics at the University of the Witwatersrand [1] [2] in Johannesburg, South Africa and Senior Scientist at the National Institute for Communicable Diseases. [3]
Moore received her Master of Science degree in Microbiology from the University of Witwatersrand. In 2003, she completed her PhD in Virology at the University of London. [2] [4]
She was one of the first scientists to bring the Omicron variant of COVID-19 to public attention. [5] She remarked of the pace of the preliminary research that “We’re flying at warp speed. [6]
Her current work focuses on the HIV neutralizing antibodies and their interactions with HIV. [4] These antibodies would form the basis for an HIV vaccine. [7]
In 2009, Moore received a Sydney Brenner Fellowship [8] from the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf) and was awarded a Friedel Sellschop Award by the University of the Witwatersrand. [9]
In 2015 while at the Centre for HIV and STI at the NICD and the Wits School of Pathology Moore was awarded the Chair in Virus-Host Dynamics for Public Health at Wits. [10]
In 2018 Moore was awarded a Silver Medal by the South African Medical Research Council for "important scientific contributions made within 10 years of having been awarded [her] PhD." [7] [11]
Moore is a founding member of the South African Young Academy of Science, [7] [12] a full Member of the American Society for Virology [12] and a Member of the ASSAf. [12]
The Vaccine Research Center (VRC), is an intramural division of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The mission of the VRC is to discover and develop both vaccines and antibody-based products that target infectious diseases.
Thumbi Ndung’u is a Kenyan-born HIV/AIDS researcher. He is the deputy director (Science) and a Max Planck Research Group Leader at the Africa Health Research Institute (AHRI) in Durban, South Africa. He is Professor of Infectious Diseases in the Division of Immunity and Infection, University College London. He is Professor and Victor Daitz Chair in HIV/TB Research and Scientific Director of the HIV Pathogenesis Programme (HPP) at the Nelson R. Mandela School of Medicine, University of KwaZulu-Natal. He holds the South African Research Chair in Systems Biology of HIV/AIDS. He is an adjunct professor of Immunology and Infectious Diseases at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He is the Programme Director of the Sub-Saharan African Network for TB/HIV Research Excellence (SANTHE), a research and capacity building initiative funded by the African Academy of Sciences and the Wellcome Trust.
Glenda Elisabeth GrayMB BCh, FC Paeds, DSc (hc), is a South African physician, scientist and activist specializing in the care of children and in HIV medicine. In 2012, she was awarded South Africa's highest honour, the Order of Mapungubwe (Silver). She became the first female president of the South African Medical Research Council in 2014, was recognized as one of the "100 Most Influential People" by Time in 2017 and was listed amongst "Africa's 50 Most Powerful Women" by Forbes Africa in 2020. Her research expertise involves developing microbicides for sexually transmitted diseases and HIV vaccines.
Zena Athene Stein was a South African epidemiologist, activist and doctor. She was professor of epidemiology and psychiatry at Columbia University.
Quarraisha Abdool Karim is an infectious diseases epidemiologist and co-founder and Associate Scientific Director of CAPRISA. She is a Professor in Clinical Epidemiology, Columbia University, New York and Pro-Vice Chancellor for African Health, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.
Salim S. Abdool Karim, MBChB, MMed, MS(Epi), FFPHM, FFPath (Virol), DipData, PhD, DSc(hc), FRS is a South African public health physician, epidemiologist and virologist who has played a leading role in the AIDS and COVID-19 pandemic. His scientific contributions have impacted the landscape of HIV prevention and treatment, saving thousands of lives.
Almyra Oveta Fuller was an associate professor of microbiology and immunology at University of Michigan Medical School. She served as the director of the African Studies Center (ASC), faculty in the ASC STEM Initiative at the University of Michigan (U-M) and an adjunct professor at Payne Theological Seminary. Fuller was a virologist and specialized in research of Herpes simplex virus, as well as HIV/AIDS. Fuller and her research team discovered a B5 receptor, advancing the understanding of Herpes simplex virus and the cells it attacks.
Anna-Lise WilliamsonMASSAf is a Professor of Virology at the University of Cape Town. Williamson obtained her PhD from the University of the Witwatersrand in 1985. Her area of expertise is human papillomavirus, but is also known on an international level for her work in developing vaccines for HIV. These vaccines have been introduce in phase 1 of clinical trial. Williamson has published more than 120 papers.
Andrea Gamarnik is an Argentinian molecular virologist noted for her work on Dengue fever. She received a 2016 L'Oréal-UNESCO Awards for Women in Science fellowship for work on mosquito-borne viruses include Dengue fever. She also was granted the Konex Award Merit Diploma in 2013 and the Platinum Konex Award in 2023 for her work in those last decades. She studied at the University of Buenos Aires and the University of California, San Francisco. She has done work for the Leloir Institute. She is the first female Argentinian to become a member of the American Academy of Microbiology.
Laetitia Charmaine Rispel is a South African Professor of Public Health at the University of the Witwatersrand. Rispel's work has investigated health policy and management and health services research.
Caroline Tiemessen is a virologist and researcher involved in HIV related research. She heads the Cell Biology Research Laboratory within the Centre for HIV and STIs at the National Institute for Communicable Diseases and is a research Professor in the School of Pathology at the University of the Witwatersrand (WITS). Her research interests include the study of HIV vaccines and the search for an HIV cure in both children and adults. In 2018 she was part of the research team involved with the transplantation of a liver from an HIV-positive woman to her HIV-negative child.
Salome Maswime is a South African clinician and global health expert. She is an Obstetrician and Gynaecologist and the Head of Global Surgery at the University of Cape Town. She advocates for women's health rights, equity in surgical and maternal care, and providing adequate health services to remote and underserved populations. She advises and consults for many institutions, including the World Health Organization. In 2017, she was honored with the Trailblazer and Young Achiever Award. She is a member of the Academy of Science of South Africa.
Bette Korber is an American computational biologist focusing on the molecular biology and population genetics of the HIV virus that causes infection and eventually AIDS. She has contributed heavily to efforts to obtain an effective HIV vaccine. She created a database at Los Alamos National Laboratory that has enabled her to design novel mosaic HIV vaccines, one of which is currently in human testing in Africa. The database contains thousands of HIV genome sequences and related data.
Theodora Hatziioannou is a Greek-American virologist. She known for her work discovering restriction factors that counteract HIV-AIDS and other primate lentiviruses, thus restricting them to specific species, and making it hard to study HIV-1 in animals. Her findings allowed her to develop the first HIV-1-based virus which is capable of recapitulating AIDS-like symptoms in a non-hominid. She is a Research Associate Professor in the Laboratory of Retrovirology at The Rockefeller University in New York. She is a co-author of a textbook on virology, Principles of Virology.
Shabir Ahmed Madhi, is a South African physician who is professor of vaccinology and director of the South African Medical Research Council Respiratory and Meningeal Pathogens Research Unit at the University of the Witwatersrand, and National Research Foundation/Department of Science and Technology Research Chair in Vaccine Preventable Diseases. In January 2021, he was appointed Dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of the Witwatersrand.
Alex Sigal is a South Africa–based virologist at the Africa Health Research Institute (AHRI) in Durban, South Africa, Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin, and University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban. His work concentrates on evolution and persistence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. His laboratory was the first to isolate the live B.1.351 (Beta) variant of SARS-CoV-2 first detected in South Africa. Sigal’s laboratory was also the first to report results on the ability of the Omicron variant to escape antibody neutralization in individuals who had two doses of the Pfizer BNT162b2 vaccine as well as from previous infections, with results also suggesting that vaccination combined with a booster or previous infection can offer protection from symptomatic infection with Omicron.
Jesse D. Bloom is an American computational virologist and Professor in the Basic Sciences Division, the Public Health Sciences Division, and the Herbold Computational Biology Program, at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center. He is also an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and an Affiliate Professor in the University of Washington departments of Genome Sciences and Microbiology.
Marietjie Van Aardt Venter or simply Marietjie Venter, is a South African virologist and researcher. She serves as a distinguished professor and research chair in Emerging Viral Threats & One Health (EViTOH) in the Infectious Disease and Oncology Research Institute (IDORI) at the University of the Witwatersrand. Since 2021, she has chaired the SAGO, a WHO permanent advisory body on the origins of emerging infectious diseases including COVID-19. Prior to this, Venter has been serving in the Department of Medical Virology at the University of Pretoria since 2005, leading the Zoonotic Arbo & Respiratory Viruses research program and co-founding the Centre for Viral Zoonoses and is the Director for the Centre for Emerging arbo and respiratory virus research (CEARV) in an extraordinary Professor position at University of Pretoria.
Julie M. Overbaugh is an American virologist. She is a professor at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. Overbaugh is best known for her translational approach to studying HIV transmission and pathogenesis and studies of how the antibody response evolves to recognize viruses. Her work in maternal and infant HIV transmission helped make clear the risk posed by breastfeeding and highlighted unique characteristics of an infant immune response that could inform vaccine development. Major scientific contributions to the understanding of HIV transmission and pathogenesis also include: identifying a bottleneck that selects one or a few variants during HIV transmission; demonstrating the importance of female hormones in HIV infection risk; showing the HIV reinfection is common; demonstrating a role for antibodies that mediate ADCC in clinical disease; showing that HIV infected infants develop unique neutralizing antibody responses to HIV.
Eftyhia Vardas FC Path is an honorary extraordinary professor in medical virology at the Department of Medical Virology, University of Stellenbosch, and head of virology at Lancet Laboratories in Johannesburg. She is a member of the COVID-19 Ministerial Advisory Committee to the South African minister of health.