Faith Osier

Professor Osier's vision is to “Make Malaria History” through vaccination. She previously led two core teams of over 25 scientists across the KEMRI–Wellcome Trust Research Program in Kenya and Heidelberg University Hospital in Germany. The projects focused on creating highly effective malaria vaccines through vaccine candidate discovery, identifying immune correlates of protection and unravelling important mechanisms underlying antibody-dependent protection. Her team designed an innovative custom protein microarray KILchip©, a first of its kind in Africa. They also built a SMART network of partners that enabled the assembly of 10,000 samples from across Africa to probe KILchip, the largest study of this nature.

Faith is the current President of the International Union of Immunological Societies (> 60,000 members globally) – the first African and only second woman in this role. She has won multiple prestigious prizes including the Royal Society Pfizer Award, the Sofja Kovalevskaja Award from the Humboldt foundation and the UKRI-MRC/DFID African Research Leader Award. She is a 2018 TED Fellow and a Fellow of the African Academy of Sciences. She serves on Boards and Expert Committees at the WHO, Wellcome, UKRI, MVI-PATH & BactiVac, and has a global footprint as a keynote & motivational speaker. She is an Official #TOGETHERBAND Ambassador for the UN Sustainable Development Goal 3: Good Health & Well-being. She is passionate about emerging African scientists as key agents of change, delivering the health interventions our continent urgently needs.