Elvis Banboye Kidzeru

Elvis Banboye Kidzeru grew up in Nso, a village in the North West of Cameroon, and completed secondary and high school at Government Bilingual High School (GBHS) Bamenda in the nearby city of Bamenda where he spent most of his childhood. He realized that a lot of people were dying of infectious diseases because they were not diagnosed early enough and not because there was no treatment available. This really challenged and drove him to choose a field where he could impact populations’ health. He graduated from University of Buea (UB) in 2008 with an Honours degree in laboratory medicine i.e. Bachelor of Medical Laboratory Sciences (BMLS). As a trained Medical Laboratory Scientist, he has worked in several diagnostic laboratories in Cameroon. Elvis is passionate about Hematology and infectious diseases with a focus on Immunology.

He was a research assistant focusing on Hematology and blood transfusion sciences at the University of the Western Cape (UWC). To gain more skills, Elvis completed an MSc (Med) in 2013, then he received his doctorate in Clinical Science and Immunology in 2016 at the University of Cape Town (UCT). During this time, he was a visiting scientist at the Center for Infectious Disease Research (CIDR) and the Seattle Children's in Washington State, USA. His MSc (Med) and PhD projects investigated the impact of HIV-exposure and myeloid-derived suppressor cells (MDSC) on vaccines immunogenicity in HIV-infected and uninfected South African mothers and their infants. Elvis continued his training further as a postdoctoral fellow at Stellenbosch University (US), at the Division of Molecular Biology and Human Genetics, optimizing the Seahorse XFp Bioenergetic Analyzer to evaluate the immune metabolic changes that may occur in regulatory pathways mediated by TB and HIV.

Elvis is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Hair and Skin Research Laboratory (HSR Lab) in the Division of Dermatology, Department of Medicine, UCT. His work is focused on keloid Disease (KD), a fibroproliferative non-malignant growth that may enhance physico-socio-psychological trauma, and is highly prevalent in individuals with pigmented dark, Hispanic and Asian ethnic skins. As part of his postdoctoral interest, he is exploring the immunological and metabolic changes that may occur in regulatory pathways in KD and that may be mediated by several drug targets.