Caroline Tiemessen

PhD

Caroline Tiemessen heads the Cell Biology Research Laboratory within the Centre for HIV and STIs at the National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD), and holds a joint appointment as Research Professor at the University of the Witwatersrand. In 2013 she was awarded the DST/NRF Research Chair of HIV Vaccine Translational Research in the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of the Witwatersrand, was appointed a member of the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf), and in 2017 was awarded the University of the Witwatersrand’s Vice Chancellor Research Award. Research interests include the study of HIV vaccines and HIV cure (paediatric and adult). A focus is on early treatment models in paediatric HIV infection, and on natural resistance models which include maternal-infant HIV-1 transmission for studying protective immunity to HIV-1, and the study of long term nonprogressors and elite controllers to understand natural attenuation of disease progression.