London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

Hear from Professor Pontiano Kaleebu as he reflects on his career in this inaugural series entitled “Confronting epidemics from a laboratory in Uganda”.

Speaker

Pontiano Kaleebu is the Director of the Medical Research Council/Uganda Virus Research Institute and London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Uganda Research Unit (MRC/UVRI and LSHTM Uganda Research Unit) based in Entebbe and is Director of Uganda Virus Research Institute (UVRI). He is a professor of immunovirology in the LSHTM's Department of Infection Biology and is a member of the School's Senior Leadership Team, he earlier served as a member of LSHTM Visiting Committee. The MRC Unit in Entebbe is one of the two MRC-UK Units outside of the United Kingdom which became part of LSHTM in 2018. It's a multidisciplinary Unit studying the HIV epidemic in rural and urban settings, emerging and re-emerging infections and non-communicable diseases.

He heads the Pathogen Genomics, Phenotype, and Immunity Programme of the Unit. The UVRI is the largest Government Research Institution in Uganda dealing in human infections and diseases of viral aetiology. He holds a medical degree from Makerere University and a PhD from Imperial College, London. He is a Fellow of Royal College of Physicians-Edinburgh, a Fellow of Imperial College London, Faculty of Medicine, and a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences. He leads a number of national and regional networks including the EDCTP East African Networks of Excellence. He has served on several committees at a national and international level, including at WHO, UNAIDS, NIAID/NIH, Africa CDC, and EU. He is a member of the EDCTP General Assembly representing Uganda. He is one of the co-chairs for this year's HIVR4P international virtual conference. He chairs the HIV drug resistance, technical working group, under the Ministry of Health and is a member of the National Antiretroviral Treatment committee.

He is a member of the Ministry of Health COVID-19 Scientific Advisory Committee, national high-level committee on accessing and deployment of COVID-19 vaccine and chairs the SARS CoV2 Laboratory Quality Assurance Committee. He is co-founder of the UVRI-IAVI HIV vaccine Program funded by IAVI. His main research interests are HIV vaccine research especially understanding protective immune responses, HIV-1 diversity, and resistance to antiretroviral drugs. He is also involved in research in other emerging and re-emerging infections. He has won many research grants and co-authored about 300 publications in peer-reviewed journals and book chapters.

Please note that the time listed is Greenwich Mean Time (GMT)