Tulio de Oliveira

Tulio de Oliveira is the Director of the Centre for Epidemic Response and Innovation (CERI) at Stellenbosch University in the Western Cape, and the KwaZulu-Natal Research Innovation and Sequencing Platform (KRISP) at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN), in Durban, South Africa. He played a leading role in the response to COVID-19 in South Africa through his visionary application of genomics and bioinformatics.

He received his BSc at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Brazil and MSc/PhD at the Nelson R Mandela School of Medicine, University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN), South Africa. He was a Marie Curie Research Fellow at the University of Oxford, UK from 2004 to 2006, and a Newton Advanced Fellow at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute (WTSI) and at the University of Edinburgh from 2015 to 2019. In 2015, he became a Professor at UKZN and in 2018, Associate Professor on Global Health at the University of Washington, Seattle, USA. In 2021, he was appointed as a Professor of Bioinformatics at the School for Data Science and Computational Thinking at Stellenbosch University.

He has worked for over 20 years with viral outbreaks, including HIV, Hepatitis B and C, Chikungunya, Dengue, SARS-CoV-2, Zika, and Yellow Fever Virus, and has more than 300 publications to his name. Among others, he is the recipient of the Gold Medal Award from the South African Medical Research Council (SAMRC), the German Africa Prize, Discovery Health Lifetime Achievement Award and, most recently, the Order of Merit Medal form the Portuguese government.