Tulio de Oliveira

Tulio de Oliveira is the Director of the Centre for Epidemic Response and Innovation (CERI) at Stellenbosch University and the KwaZulu-Natal Research Innovation and Sequencing Platform (KRISP) at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN), South Africa. He played a leading role in South Africa’s COVID-19 response through the application of genomics and bioinformatics for real-time epidemic surveillance.

He obtained his BSc from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, and his MSc and PhD from the Nelson R. Mandela School of Medicine at UKZN. He held a Marie Curie Research Fellowship at the University of Oxford and a Newton Advanced Fellowship at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and the University of Edinburgh. He has held academic appointments at UKZN, the University of Washington and Stellenbosch University, where he is Professor of Bioinformatics.

His research focuses on viral evolution and genomic epidemiology of infectious diseases, including HIV, hepatitis B and C, chikungunya, dengue, SARS-CoV-2, Zika and yellow fever virus. He has authored more than 300 scientific publications and received several honours, including the South African Medical Research Council Gold Medal, the German Africa Prize, the Discovery Health Lifetime Achievement Award and the Order of Merit Medal from the Government of Portugal.