Keynote talk + Q&A

Revisit the talk and Q&A using the link above, and/or check out the video and bios below.

About the Speaker:
Faith Osier, PhD

Twitter: @FaithOsier

Faith is a Professor of Malaria Immunology and the Executive Director of the IAVI Human Immunology Laboratory at Imperial College London. IAVIs mission is to translate scientific discoveries into affordable, globally accessible public health solutions. Her team includes scientists, managers and operational staff, PhD and Masters’ students. The project portfolio includes HIV, TB, Emerging Infectious Diseases – Marburg, Lassa, Ebola, Covid-19 – and Malaria. The projects span discovery science, preclinical and clinical vaccine development. The lab specializes in GCLP-grade immunoassays to enable product registration with regulatory authorities and is the central biorepository for IAVIs clinical research centers worldwide.

Faith has deep expertise is in malaria where she believes that we can “Make Malaria History” through vaccination. She previously led two core teams of over 25 scientists across KEMRI–Wellcome, Kenya and Heidelberg University Hospital, Germany. Her teams’ projects focused on creating highly effective malaria vaccines through vaccine candidate discovery, identifying immune correlates of protection and unravelling important mechanisms underlying antibody-dependent protection. They designed an innovative custom protein microarray KILchip©, a first of its kind in Africa. She and her team built a SMART network of partners that enabled the assembly of 10,000 samples from across Africa to probe KILchip©, the largest study of this nature.

Faith is the current President of the International Union of Immunological Societies (> 60,000 members globally) – the first African and only second woman in this role. She has won multiple prestigious prizes including the Royal Society Pfizer, the Sofja Kovalevskaja and the UKRI-MRC/DFID African Research Leader Awards. She is a 2018 TED Fellow and a Fellow of the African Academy of Sciences. She serves on Boards and Expert Committees at the WHO, Wellcome, UKRI, MVI-PATH & BactiVac, and has a global footprint as a keynote & motivational speaker. She is an Official #TOGETHERBAND Ambassador for the UN Sustainable Development Goal 3: Good Health & Well-being. She is passionate about emerging African scientists as key agents of change, delivering the health interventions the continent urgently needs.