Penny Moore

Penny Moore is the South African Research Chair of Virus–Host Dynamics and a Reader/Associate Professor at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) and the National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD). She also holds a joint appointment as Honorary Senior Scientist in Virus–Host Dynamics at the Centre for the AIDS Programme of Research in South Africa (CAPRISA), University of KwaZulu-Natal, and is an Adjunct Member of the Institute of Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine (IDM) at the University of Cape Town.

She co-directs a team of scientists and postgraduate students working in HIV vaccine discovery, integrating virology and immunology to study virus–antibody interactions. Her research is focused on HIV neutralising antibodies and how they interact with the evolving virus, with extensive work on HIV glycoprotein sequencing, antibody response measurement, and monoclonal antibody isolation and characterisation.

Her research is supported by major funders including the NIH, South African Medical Research Council, International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, and the South African National Research Foundation. Over nearly two decades, she has authored more than 100 publications in the field. More recently, her platforms have also been applied to SARS-CoV-2, where her team developed tools to measure humoral immune responses and isolate virus-specific monoclonal antibodies.