Penny Moore

Prof.  Penny Moore is the South African Research Chair of Virus-Host Dynamics and Reader/Associate Professor at Wits and the National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD). She holds a joint appointment as the Centre for the AIDS Programme of Research (CAPRISA) Honorary Senior Scientist in Virus-Host Dynamics at the University of Kwazulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa, and is Adjunct Member of the Institute of Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine (IDM) at the University of Cape Town in the Western Cape, South Africa. She co-directs a team of more than 15 scientists and 10 postgraduate students who work in the field of HIV vaccine discovery, combining virology and immunology. Her research is currently funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the South Africa Medical Research Council, the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative and the South African National Research Foundation. In the past 18 years she has contributed towards more than 100 papers, focusing predominantly on HIV neutralising antibodies and their interplay with the evolving virus, a result of extensive collaborations within South Africa and internationally. She has extensive experience with sequencing and analysis of HIV glycoproteins, measuring neutralising antibodies antibody responses and the isolation and characterisation of monoclonal antibodies to HIV antigens. More recently, with the emergence of SARS-CoV-2, her team has redeployed many of these platforms and technologies, developing tools to measure humoral immune responses to SARS-CoV-2 infection and vaccination and also to isolate South African SARS-CoV-2-directed mAbs.