Dr. Penny Moore
NRF/DST South African Research Chair of Virus-Host Dynamics
Reader/Associate Professor, University of the Witwatersrand / National Institute for
Communicable Diseases (NICD), South Africa
GVN Center Director
Bio sketch
Prof. Penny Moore is the South African Research Chair of Virus-Host Dynamics and Reader / Associate Professor at the University of the Witwatersrand and the National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD). She holds a joint appointment as CAPRISA Honorary Senior Scientist in Virus-Host Dynamics at the Centre for the AIDS Programme of Research (CAPRISA), University of Kwazulu-Natal and is Adjunct Member of the Institute of Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine (IDM) at the University of Cape Town. 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 NIH, the SA Medical Research Council, the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative and the SA National Research Foundation.
In the past 15 years that she has worked in the HIV field she has contributed towards more than 100 papers, focusing predominantly on HIV neutralizing 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 neutralizing antibodies antibody responses and the isolation and characterization 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.