Researcher profile

Penelope Linda Moore

Penny Moore, PhD, is the South African Research Chair of Virus-Host Dynamics and Research Professor at Wits University and the National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD) in South Africa. She is Director of the Antibody Immunity Research Unit, an extramural unit (AIRU) of the SA Medical Research Council (SAMRC) and a Research Fellow at the Infectious Diseases and Oncology Research Institute (IDORI). She also holds a joint appointment as Honorary Senior Scientist in Virus-Host Dynamics at CAPRISA, University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN). Penny is a member of the Academy of Science of South Africa and the United States National Academy of Sciences. She directs a research group who work in the fields of HIV and SARS-CoV-2 vaccine discovery, combining Virology, Immunology and Bioinformatics. More recently, the team has expanded to work on Influenza, Cytomegalovirus, Respiratory Syncytial Virus, Adenoviruses and Ebola. In the past 20 years, she has contributed towards more than 200 papers, focusing predominantly on neutralizing antibodies and their interplay with evolving viruses, a result of extensive national and international collaborations. She has a very strong focus on mentorship and capacity development and supervises several postgraduate students and post-doctoral fellows.