Dr. Faith Osier

Biography

Professor Osier's vision is to 'Make Malaria History' through vaccination. She previously led core teams of 25 scientists at the KEMRI–Wellcome Trust Research Program in Kenya and at Heidelberg University Hospital in Germany. Her projects have focused on creating highly effective malaria vaccines, vaccine candidate discovery, and identifying immune correlates of protection while unraveling important mechanisms underlying antibody-dependent protection. Her team designed the innovative custom protein microarray KILchip©, the first of its kind in Africa. They built the SMART network of partners, which enabled the assembly of 10,000 samples in Africa to probe the KILchip, making it the largest study of its nature. Faith is currently the President of the International Union of Immunological Societies with over 60,000 members globally, a significant achievement as an African woman. She has won multiple prestigious prizes, including the Royal Society Pfizer Award, the Sofja Kovalevskaja Award from the Humboldt Foundation, and the UKRI-MRC/DFID African Research Leader Award. In 2018, she was a TED Fellow and is a Fellow of the African Academy of Sciences. Additionally, she serves on the boards of expert committees for Wellcome, UKRI, MVI-PATH, and BactiVac, and is a global keynote and motivational speaker. Faith is also an Official Ambassador for #TOGETHERBAND for the UN Sustainable Development Goal 3: Good Health & Well-being, and is passionate about empowering emerging African scientists as key agents of change, delivering the health interventions the continent urgently needs.

Research Interests