Faith Osier
KEMRI-Wellcome Trust Research Programme
Kenya
Faith is a 2018 TED Fellow and the Vice-President/President-elect of the IUIS. She has won multiple international prizes for her research in understanding the mechanisms of immunity against Plasmodium falciparum in man. She aims to translate this knowledge into highly effective vaccines against malaria. She is Visiting Professor of Malaria Immunology in the Nuffield Dept of Medicine, Oxford University, and holds the prestigious Sofja Kovalevskaja Award from the Alexander Humboldt Foundation as well as an EDCTP Senior Fellowship. In 2014, she won the Royal Society Pfizer Prize, UK. She holds major research grants from the Wellcome Trust and is an MRC/DfID African Research Leader.
Faith originally trained as a Paediatrician in Kenya, before specializing in Immunology in Liverpool, and later obtaining a PhD from the Open University, UK. Her interests include vaccine development, with an emphasis on malaria. Her research groups are based at the KEMRI-Wellcome Training Programme in Kilifi, Kenya and at the Heidelberg University Hospital in Heidelberg, Germany. She is passionate about capacity building and the training of African scientists to deliver the interventions needed on the continent.