Caroline T. Tiemessen

Professor Caroline Tiemessen heads the Cell Biology Research Laboratory within the Centre for HIV and STIs at the National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD), and holds a joint appointment as Research Professor at the University of the Witwatersrand. In 2005 Prof. Tiemessen was awarded a prestigious Wellcome Trust International Senior Research Fellowship for 5 years to study protective immunity in the context of maternal-infant HIV-1 transmission. In 2013 she was awarded the DST/NRF Research Chair of HIV Vaccine Translational Research in the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of the Witwatersrand, was appointed a member of the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf). She was recently awarded the Vice-Chancellors Research award for 2017 at the University of the Witwatersrand - in recognition of her sustained excellence in HIV research. Research interests include the study of HIV vaccines and HIV cure (paediatric and adult), with a major focus on the study of natural resistance models for identifying and understanding correlates of protection. These include maternal-infant HIV-1 transmission and adult transmission models for studying protective immunity to HIV-1, and the study of long term nonprogressors and elite controllers to understand natural attenuation of disease progression.